The declining use of medical eponyms associated with the Nazi regime: A case study of changes in the International Classification of Diseases of the World Health Organization

Abstract

This work focuses on a specific type of terminological variants, i.e. medical eponymous terms gradually replaced by alternative, noneponymous terms. This descriptive study is conducted on a controlled medical terminology set – the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) of the World Health Organization (WHO). The focus of the study is on the eponymous terms named after physicians associated with the Nazi regime. The aim is to analyse if these eponyms were included in ICD-10 and if they were transferred into the new, 11th version of the Classification. Of all the eponymous terms presented in the paper, seven were found in ICD-10. The overall result of this study indicates that the eponymous terms associated with the Nazi regime have been replaced with alternatives or removed from the 11th version of the International Classification of Diseases in all cases, except for Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.