On Bresch's Glossary of Eponyms

SIR: Mark Twain famously wrote, “The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” Equally exaggerated is David Bresch's claim¹ that “no one has ever composed a glossary of psychiatry's numerous eponyms.” After many years of work, in 1999 we published a book on the subject.² In writing this book we used the principal medical and psychiatric dictionaries in English, French, German, and Spanish, as well as varied bibliographical sources and the main biomedical (MEDLINE, Embase, etc.) and genetic (OMIM) databases. We also traveled to the main Spanish libraries and newspaper archives and ended up visiting the rich Cambridge University Library in England. The methodology we used yielded a total of 811 eponyms, although we did not include some whose use is not yet established. For every eponym, we list a description of the symptom, syndrome, illness, sign, test, or complex; the original reference where it is described for the first time; a brief biography of the author; the synonymy and the eponym's English, French, and German versions; and, finally, bibliographical references to descriptions of the eponym.

In view of the above, we feel that Dr. Bresch's work is worthy of praise in that it attempts to recover a tradition that has proven its practical usefulness, but at the same time we believe that its approach is reductionist, dealing with a small number of eponyms in just two or three lines and failing to provide any biographical information on the authors. Another major defect is what Lain Entralgo³ calls an attitude of “Adamism” (the researcher enters a scientific field as Adam would enter Eden: as a place where no man has gone before): the author did not bother to check the statement with which he starts his work, either by consulting the usual bibliographical indices or the well-known ISBN. Needless to say, if one is to do an appropriate job, one must start by being exhaustive in one's use of sources.