To the Editor.—I am writing to acknowledge unintentional errors, which were included in my recent Images in Pathology submission to this journal.1 In this article, I mistakenly referred to “Homer-Wright” rosettes. I have since been corrected by several students of pathology history to the effect that these are in fact Homer Wright rosettes (no hyphen), which were named after the eminent pathologist James Homer Wright. One of these historians was kind enough to include an article that he coauthored,2 which outlines the remarkable contributions of Wright to the field of pathology. A personal review of several major pathology and subspecialty texts reveals that the offending hyphen occurs in several of them. While some lack the displaced dash, others have variation from one chapter to another, perhaps reflecting the individual author's source of reference. I certainly will be more precise in my terminology in the future. I cannot help but wonder why an eponym would include a middle and last name, since in his publications, he was referred to as either “James Homer Wright” or “James H. Wright.” Sculley and Vickery3 suggest that this derives from a British custom of using middle and last names for eponyms.
Further, to right another wrong (pun intended), I misspelled another eponym as Flexner-Winterstein rosettes, rather than Flexner-Wintersteiner rosettes. I certainly hope that an O'Malleyism does not come to represent the pathology version of a malapropism, an eponym referring the accidental use of a word which is intended but which has a different meaning!