[PW] Re: what is the origin of "Vesper's curse"

[Peter Macinnis]

The usual source for information like this is http://www.whonamedit.com/ 
but this returns a blank in this case.  If you are likely to get 
questions like this, the site is worth bookmarking.  There are gaps 
(like James Wimshurst, the almost-anonymous inventor of the Wimshurst 
machine, details upon application :-) but they claim as of this morning 
to list 7771 eponyms.

Vesper, Vespers, Vesper's or Vespers'?  If English is not your first 
language, all four might seem worth trying, so the question of the 
apostrophe is a vexed one.  To many Anglocentric Australians, forms such 
as "Down syndrome" are dismissed sniffily as American, but while US 
writers are more likely to write that (rather than "Down's syndrome), 
there is more to it than a rude jostling of bristling linguistic 
nationalists.

There is a (slowly) growing consensus that while the tradition has 
always been to call syndromes by the name of the discoverer in the 
apostrophe form (as in "Down's syndrome"), this causes confusion when 
people are not of an English-speaking background, and causes general 
confusion when somebody called Glass, Potts or Julius is involved. The 
simpler "Down syndrome" formation has been recommended since the 1970s, 
and if it goes against tradition, it makes searches easier, especially 
for those who do not have English as their first language.

In 1974, a conference at the US National Institute of Health stated in a 
post-conference report: "The possessive form of an eponym should be 
discontinued, since the author neither had nor owned the disorder." The 
USA has largely followed this recommendation since then. This 
recommendation was supported by _The Lancet_ in Britain at the time, but 
has not always been followed.

Take a case like Reyes or Reye's syndrome: it would under the 
no-apostrophe rule be referred to as Reye syndrome (after R. Douglas 
Reye, MD an Australian pathologist, who identified it in 1963).  Old 
names like wool-sorter's disease, used for anthrax, generally remain as 
is, because 'wool-sorter disease' sounds a little like being infected 
with wool-sorters. Legionnaire's disease, also seen as Legionnaires' 
disease and Legionnaires disease, will be easier to search for if it is 
uniformly called Legionnaire disease.

peter macinnis

(who had to decide an encyclopedia's policy on eponymic apostrophes, 
four years ago, and came out against them -- somebody else decided on 
how we would spell 'encyclopedia')

Steele Sue (RW6) PAHNT wrote:
> "Vesper's curse" is a medical condition which causes back pain and keeps
> patients awake at night.  A doctor at my hospital is trying to find out
> why is is so named - who was Vesper and what was the curse?
> 
> So far I have found out that Vesper was the Roman God of the evening,
> linked with the evening star (also known as Hesperos in Greek
> mythology).  It appears that Vesper may have cursed Hypnos, the god of
> sleep, but we are unclear as to what the curse was, and why he was
> cursed.
> 
> If anyone is able to help, I would be very grateful.



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