Ear, nose and throat medicine

The fifth entry is a trompa auditiva, and the name an English reader will meet for it is « the Eustachian tube ». Behind that word stands Bartolomeo Eustachi, an Italian anatomist of the sixteenth century, and what English did with his surname is worth watching. It took the Latin form of the name, turned it into an adjective, kept the capital letter, and parked it in front of an ordinary noun, where it now sits without anybody thinking of a person. The same move produced « the Fallopian tube », from Gabriele Falloppio, who taught in the same century. Medicine is full of these, and they behave in two ways that are easy to get wrong. Some take no possessive — « the Achilles tendon », « the Eustachian tube » — while others have traditionally kept one, as in « Parkinson’s disease »; and American medical style has been dropping the apostrophe, so « Down syndrome » now stands beside British « Down’s syndrome ». The descriptive name exists in English too, « the auditory tube », and it is what the anatomical lists prescribe — but in a clinic it is the man’s name that gets spoken.