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In naming a disease, priority is usually given to the doctor who first recognized it. The patients, after all, very happily would never have run across the disease. A litany of diseases would include a roll call of famous nineteenth-century medical men, who at the start of modern medicine were the first to identify coherent patterns of symptoms. Many of the diseases first described in the nineteenth century bear the names of their Amerigo Vespuccis of chronic illness, their Hales and Bopps gazing through microscopes instead of telescopes. Such an achievement is something for doctors to be proud of: by identifying a disease, they start medicine on the path to an understanding and perhaps even to a cure. Careful observation of bodies and diseases was an increasingly common practice in early modern medicine, especially after the invention of the stethoscope allowed for easy communication of seemingly decipherable signals between the inside of a patient and the trained doctor. More traditional doctors considered the stethoscope a gimmick; physician James Cholmeley of Guy's Hospital in London famously used his as a flower vase. But there were also at Guy's three giants who listened to the rhythms of the body, and their surnames will be familiar for the eponymous diseases they discovered: Thomas Addison, Richard Bright, and Thomas Hodgkin.
A disease, though it may kill you, does not exist until it is named. Thomas Addison found Addison's disease by noting changes in skin pigmentation, and he lectured on this anemia in 1843 and 1849. Jane Austen may have died from Addison's before it existed, before it had a name. Bright's disease is glomerulonephritis, Morbus Brightii, now a general term for kidney disease. Thomas Hodgkin in 1832 discovered the lymphatic cancer now called Hodgkin's disease (which included then what we now distinguish as non-Hodgkin lymphoma). As a Quaker in thought and dress, his demeanor and his antislavery and anticolonial views stifled his career, and so he left Guy's before the other two doctors in order to lead what we would today call human rights groups. Some doctors' names haven't eclipsed other names for diseases: in 1874 the Norwegian Gerhard Heinrik Armeur Hansen discovered the bacillus that causes Hansen's disease, or as it has been known from biblical time when...