Many body parts are named after people, not for what they do: the fallopian tubes come from the 16th-century anatomist Gabriele Falloppio, and the eustachian tube from Bartolomeo Eustachi. These eponyms stuck because they are short, memorable and carry stories that help students remember them. Most come from European Renaissance anatomy and celebrate mainly white European men, which leaves out the contributions of women and non-European scholars. Some honour people with harmful pasts, such as Hans Reiter, a Nazi physician whose name was attached to reactive arthritis. The International Federation of Associations of Anatomists encourages descriptive terms, with eponyms in brackets, as a way to keep the history without letting it set the vocabulary.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.