Sjögren

Henrik Samuel Conrad Sjögren was born in 1899 in Köping, a small city on Lake Mälaren in central Sweden. He trained at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and completed his doctoral thesis at the University of Gothenburg in 1933. That thesis described 19 patients, all women, who shared a specific triad of symptoms: severely dry eyes, dry mouth, and chronic joint inflammation. No one before him had gathered those three findings under a single clinical identity.

The Swedish surname Sjögren is a compound of 'sjö' (lake or sea) and 'gren' (branch), the kind of two-part descriptive surname adopted by Swedish families throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Sjögren himself never applied his own name to the syndrome he described. That was done by other clinicians and medical writers in the 1940s and 1950s as the condition gained recognition in European and American rheumatology. By 1953, 'Sjögren's syndrome' was the accepted term in the English-language literature.

The ö in Sjögren presented a practical problem for English and American printers and typists who lacked the character on standard keyboards. Medical journals and textbooks routinely dropped the umlaut, writing 'Sjogren' without it. This simplified form became standard in English-language medicine, so thoroughly that many patients and physicians who use the name daily are unaware that the ö exists in the original Swedish. The man's name traveled across the Atlantic stripped of its diacritical mark.

Sjögren practiced and taught in Jönköping for most of his career and lived to see his name become familiar to millions of patients worldwide. He died in 1986 at the age of 86. The syndrome he identified is now understood as an autoimmune condition in which the immune system attacks moisture-producing glands, and current estimates place its prevalence at between 0.1 and 4 percent of the global population, with women outnumbering men at a ratio of roughly nine to one. The lake and the branch have become a diagnosis.