A disease of one’s own

I posted a note last May describing the delight to be had in finding something wrong with you which baffles your doctor (and by the way whatever it was I had has now stopped hurting), but this is a small pleasure compared with the fun to be got by having some nasty affliction actually named after you. Best if you don’t actually suffer from it, of course, but merely devote several decades of your life to discovering it.

There is a splendid website called Whonamedit which is devoted to eponymous diseases, or syndromes, or obscure body parts, or procedures. Work on it is still in progress—it now lists a mere 7,829 eponyms but eventually it will include more than 15,000 eponyms and 6,000 persons.

As one does on a dull Sunday afternoon, I was browsing through it today and found some fascinating and little-known byways to explore. How many people, for example, know that a Morand’s Foot has eight toes, and that it is named after Sauveur François Morand, an eighteenth-century pioneer in urology and the first to devise the Trendelenburg position? And who would not want to learn exactly what the prognosis is if they acquire Espildora Luque's syndrome, or Ledderhose's contracture, or even, God forbid, Kaposi's varicelliform eruption?

But the one which I found the most interesting was not really a medical condition at all. It is called Yentl’s syndrome and is named after the heroine of a story by Isaac Bashevis Singer called Yentl the Yeshiva Boy, in which Yentl had to disguise herself as a man to attend school and study the Talmud at an all-male Jewish school in 19th century Poland; it was made into a 1983 film directed and starred in by Barbra Streisand. The syndrome describes the phenomenon that women are treated less optimally in the management of coronary heart disease than men.

How, exactly? Is it prevalent today? And was the problem first identified by cardiac specialists, or feminists, or, most likely, feminist cardiac specialists? I suppose one could find out, for Google brings up seventy other websites that refer to it, but I shall leave it there, for I think I've got a slight touch of Zenker's diverticulum coming on.