LostInSpace wrote:
Most of the academic articles I've read refer to "Asperger syndrome," so that is how I've written it in my Master's paper. Additionally, if you look at the example of "Down syndrome" (which is definitely spelled without an apostrophe), you can see that being named after someone doesn't necessary mean it should be spelled with "'s".
If fact, if you look at the list of
eponymous disorders on Wikipedia (those named after people), you notice this same pattern of omitting the "'s" in most (not all) of them.
A couple of years ago, the Wikicrats decided to standardize on omitting the
's in most cases, and this logic was applied when they renamed the article
Asperger's syndrome to
Asperger syndrome. They reasoned that, when pronounced, /z.s/ tends to assimilate to [.s]; this trend is even more obvious with /s.s/ being realized as [.s]. Moreover, as these syndromes and disorders enter the vernacular, the
's tends to be lost. This is why
Alzheimer's disease is never written or said as
Alzheimer disease; assimilation does not occur.
Yes, at one point, most people did write
Down's syndrome or
Tourette's syndrome. The DSM-IV-TR, for example, still calls Tourette's syndrome
Tourette's Disorder.