Naming a disease after a person — Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, Graves' — looks like an honor, but it quietly does something strange to how we think. The eponym freezes a living process into a static object: not 'what is happening in this particular body over time' but 'which category does this fit.' The sociologist Ian Hacking called this 'making up people' — the idea that the diagnostic categories we create loop back and reshape the very phenomena they describe. But there's a sharper version of this problem in the African philosophical concept of Ubuntu: *umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu*, a person is a person through other persons. Illness, in that frame, is never purely biological — it is always relational, located inside a web of recognition. When a clinician assigns a category, they are not just describing a patient; they are, in a subtle way, co-creating what that patient becomes. The practical consequence is uncomfortable: the confident diagnosis given early, repeated across handovers, entered into the chart, starts to organize what every subsequent clinician sees and what the patient begins to expect of themselves. Categories aren't neutral containers. They have weight.

Name a diagnosis or label you've attached to a patient — or yourself — that has outlasted the evidence that first justified it.

Drawing from African Philosophy (Ubuntu) combined with Philosophy of Classification — Ian Hacking & Ubuntu philosophical tradition (synthesized)