A Buiding, Room, Road, Bridge and Disease by Any Other Name

 

You will find Bernie Marcus's name on buildings throughout Atlanta and cities around the world. The Marcus Autism Center, The Marcus Hart Valve Center, the Marcus Trauma and Emergency Center, all in Atlanta, and the Marcus National Blood Center, in Israel. All these facilities are testaments to Bernie's commitment to humankind. The Trump name is also on buildings around the world. All these edifices are testaments to Trump's narcissism.

 

Naming buildings can be tricky business. When we built the Hillel building at Johns Hopkins University, two donors made impressive naming gifts. One got the building name, and we named the Hillel Foundation after the other. That was the easy part—designing the signage on the front of the building so that each name got equal billing was far more complicated.

 

Rooms get names as well. At a Hillel Foundation in Boston, there is an elevator named after a donor. John Waters dedicated the "John Waters All Gender Restrooms" at the Baltimore Museum of Art. This works on many levels. In Europe, these would be the "John Waters Water Closets."

 

Public work projects also have names. I love the renamed Thurgood Marshall Airport in Baltimore, hate Ronald Reagan Airport in Washington, think John Wayne Airport in Long Beach, California is a hoot, and am not surprised that Charles De Gaulle in Paris is difficult to navigate. Fiorello La Guardia has stopped rolling over in his grave now that the airport named in his honor is not a traveler's disaster area.

 

The George Washington Bridge was named after our first president, whose military leadership led to a series of defeats in the early years of the Revolutionary War, handing the British control of what are now all five boroughs and much of Westchester. He retreated to New Jersey—perhaps just below where his eponymous bridge now stands. The old Kosciuszko Bridge linking Queens and Brooklyn was an abomination during rush hour. The new one is beautiful. Unfortunately, there are only 12 people in New York who know who Tadeusz Kosciuszko was and 6 who know how to pronounce his name (Wikipedia is less than fully helpful in this regard: /ˌkɒziˈʊskoʊ, ˌkɒʒiˈʊʃkoʊ/ KOZ-ee-UUSK-oh, KOZH-ee-UUSH-koh). The Holland Tunnel in NY was not named after the country—otherwise it would have been the Netherlands Tunnel, hardly an appropriate name for a tube buried deep beneath the waters. It was named for its chief engineer, Clifford M. Holland, who died before the tunnel's completion. His successor, Milton Freeman, died five months later. Certainly, an inauspicious start.

 

Here in Atlanta, highway overpasses and road intersections are named after people. The Tom Moreland Interchange is colloquially known as "Spaghetti Junction." Moreland was, according to Wikipedia, "one of the United States' leading road building experts." Those of us who have traversed Spaghetti Junction find this difficult to believe.

 

I wonder about medical conditions named after people. According to Wikipedia, there are 605 diseases and syndromes named after people—both the physicians who identified them and the patients who suffered because of them. Anybody who actively follows baseball knows about Tommy John surgery. Nobody who actively follows baseball knows what Tommy John surgery is. Further, my guess is that there are fewer than 15 orthopedic surgeons around the world who know who Tommy John is. Valentino's syndrome, named after Rudolph Valentino, is "pain presenting in the right lower quadrant of the abdomen caused by a duodenal ulcer." Valentino ultimately died from complications of this condition.

 

Not all the owners of these eponymous conditions were real people. For instance, there is a psychological disorder characterized by delusional jealousy known as "Othello Syndrome." There was no real Munchausen, but rather a literary character, "Baron Munchausen." This psychological syndrome, also called "factitious disorder imposed on self" (FDIS), is one where "individuals play the role of a sick patient to receive some form of psychological validation, such as attention, sympathy, or physical care" (Wikipedia). It is also known as "Kvetcher's Syndrome."

 

Not that it will be an issue, but I think about a disease named after me. I have coined the term "food blindness"—a condition where a person cannot see the Tupperware container of tuna fish in front of one's face in the refrigerator (a condition unique to married men). I'd be honored if that came to be known as "David Raphael Syndrome." Other than a caring spouse, there is no cure for this heart-wrenching condition.