One of the things for which anatomy used to be famous was its eponyms. An eponym may be a person, place, or thing from which something takes its name. Perhaps the most famous but overlooked eponym is the sandwich. Although there is disagreement over how the eponym came about, all agree that it was named after John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich.
Most anatomical eponyms are named after people. But there have been a lot of people doing a lot of work on the same things. Some structures have been named more than once. Some have merely identified a structure; others have come after and done detailed work on its structure and function. After whom should such a structure be named?
Eponyms are particularly problematic in that they usually contain no indication of where in the body they are located and may lack anything to indicate to what they might refer. This is an obvious problem for the student—or at least, it was. Fortunately, the use of eponyms has been discouraged. Beginning in 1895 with the Nomina Anatomica, the aim has been for a standard nomenclature for anatomical structures. This was superseded in 1998 by the Terminologia Anatomica.
Unfortunately (for some), the nomenclature used is often based on Latin. Without a basic knowledge of Latin, one may have difficulty remembering the terminology.
That said, a ligament I found very easy to remember when first learning anatomy was Poupart’s ligament. From its name, one could at least surmise that it is a ligament of sorts. It is a fibrous band in the groin. It is now called the inguinal ligament, which provides an adequate description of where and what it is.
The eponym is rather distinctive It has nothing to do with the smell (poo!) of the parts near to which it is situated (or so I used to, light-heartedly, tell my students). Although that was a perfect way of remembering where it was. I did not know it at the time (and I don’t think my teacher ever knew) that it was named after the French physician, anatomist and entomologist François Poupart (1661-1709).
As noted above, a common problem with eponyms is that they are sometimes named after more than one person. That is the case with Poupart’s ligament. It is sometimes referred to as the Fallopian ligament, after Gabriele Falloppio (1522/23-1562), who is most famous for another eponymous structure, the fallopian (now uterine) tubes.*
It was Falloppio who first described the inguinal ligament. It was Poupart who highlighted its clinical relevance in relation to inguinal hernia. Based on that, who merits the eponym? (The simple answer is, ‘Neither; eponyms are no longer used!’)
Furthermore, Poupart’s ligament is sometimes confused with Colles ligament after Abraham Colles (1773-1843)—perhaps most famous for Colles fracture—a common form of wrist fracture. Colles ligament is also in the groin but is correctly the ‘ligamentum inguinale reflexum—triangular fascia’ or nowadays ‘reflected inguinal ligament (triangular fascia).
*(Surprisingly, the fallopian tubes still go by the eponym on Wikipedia, where the following note is given…
“Though the name Fallopian tube is eponymous, it is often spelt with a lower case f from the assumption that the adjective fallopian has been absorbed into modern English as the de facto name for the structure.”)
