Curated playlist
Diseases named after discoverers
- Parkinson's diseaseThree of the six first cases of Parkinson's disease were strangers a doctor watched on London streets.
- Alzheimer's diseaseA German psychiatrist followed one patient until 1906, then reported what he found inside her brain.
- LeprosyIn the 1980s, 5.2 million people around the world were living with leprosy. By 2020, that figure had fallen below 200,000. Leprosy, also called Hansen's disease, is a long-term infection caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium leprae, or by…
- Crohn's diseaseCrohn's disease is an inflammatory bowel disease that can strike any segment of the digestive tract, from the mouth all the way to the anus. One in five people living with it is admitted to hospital each year. Within ten years of the first…
- Tourette syndromeTourette syndrome was once considered so rare that in 1972 the US National Institutes of Health believed fewer than 100 cases existed in the entire United States. A registry from 1973 listed only 485 cases worldwide. Those numbers now look…
- Down syndromeIn 2015, an estimated 5.4 million people worldwide were living with Down syndrome, also known as trisomy 21. The condition arises when a person carries all or part of a third copy of chromosome 21. It appears in about 1 in every 1,000…
- Hashimoto's thyroiditisIn 1912, a Japanese physician named Hakaru Hashimoto, working at the medical school of Kyushu University, published a paper of 30 pages with 5 illustrations. His evidence came from only four women. In each of them, the thyroid gland was…
- Huntington's diseaseAround Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela, Huntington's disease affects up to 700 people in every 100,000. That is far above the worldwide figure of 5 to 10 per 100,000. Huntington's disease is a fatal neurodegenerative illness that is usually…
- Ehlers–Danlos syndromeEhlers-Danlos syndromes can turn ordinary movements into injuries. In people with extreme joint instability, a dislocation may follow something as small as rolling over in bed or turning a doorknob. The name covers a group of 13 genetic…
- Creutzfeldt–Jakob diseaseCreutzfeldt-Jakob disease, usually shortened to CJD, leaves a strange mark on the human brain. Under a microscope, a sample of affected tissue is riddled with tiny holes where nerve cells have died, and whole regions can resemble a sponge.…
- Marfan syndromeMarfan syndrome takes its name from Antoine Marfan, a French pediatrician who described it in 1896 after noticing striking features in a five-year-old girl. More than a century later, somewhere between 1 in 5,000 and 1 in 10,000 people…
- Graves' diseaseGraves' disease is the autoimmune condition behind the dark sunglasses that became part of German folk singer Heino's trademark look. He wore them to hide his symptoms, and the disguise ended up defining him. Behind that image sits a…