Anatomists and Eponyms: The Spirit of Anatomy Past

The older traditional human anatomical textbooks included numerous anatomical eponyms. This was a desire to perpetuate the memory of original investigators by associating their names with the anatomical structures that they had discovered. The current trends in most medical school curricula have reduced the subject matter in Human Anatomy to its barest essentials with the elimination of all eponyms. Both students and teachers are now deprived of learning the history associated with many of the former great anatomists. The objective of this book is therefore to introduce eponyms with pictures or plates depicting the investigator for which the anatomical structure is named. Only the more common eponyms associated with the various anatomical systems of the human body are included.