It is well known that Laennec gave cirrhosis its name from the Greek word kirrhos (tawny), in a brief footnote to his treatise De l'auscultation médiate (1819), but the eponym "Laennec's cirrhosis" is rarely used in France. This article explores the reasons why North American physicians commemorate a French chest specialist in their name for a hepatic lesion that had first been recognized in England more than a century earlier. It traces the content and fortunes of Laennec's essay on cirrhosis, part of an incomplete manuscript, including its eventual partial publication by a British editor in the original French. A survey of 19th-century literature on cirrhosis revealed that it was not until the publication of William Osler's textbook that the eponym came into common use. The geographic patterns of influence of Osler's book and the differing preoccupations of physicians on the two sides of the English Channel probably combined to result in the paradoxic employment of this eponym.