What does your name say about you?

In 2015, an orthopaedic surgeon called Limb, with three other doctors called Limb, wrote a paper on whether people’s names were correlated with their medical specialties. The findings were striking.

Most popular

Brendan O’Neill

Hamas’s final torment of the Bibas family

In general surgery there were practitioners called Gore, Butcher, Boyle and Blunt. In cardiology, Hart and Pump. In anaesthesia there was a Payne but also a Painstil.

For the 313,445 entries in the medical register that they examined, the median frequency of names relevant to medicine was one in 149 – but in neurology, one in every 21 doctors had a name relevant to medicine. In genito-urinary medicine, one in 52 had a relevant name. The authors admitted that specialties with the largest proportion of relevant names benefitted from the wide range of alternative English terms for the same anatomical parts and their functions, as in urology’s Cox, Ball, Dick, Waterfall.

Limb et al were aware of an article on incontinence in the British Journal of Urology (1977), authored by Splatt and Weedon. It had featured at the beginning of a long series in the New Scientist that began in 1994. A letter to the magazine in that year from Professor C.R. Cavonius (1932-2003) seems to have first applied the term nominative determinism to this phenomenon by which one’s name is deemed to influence one’s choice of occupation or personal characteristics.

Thus Walter Brain, the 1st Lord Brain, edited the learned journal Brain from 1954 to the day of his death in 1966. Igor Judge, who died in 2023, did become a judge, but was never known as Judge Judge, being Mr Justice Judge in the High Court.