The story
First described in 1905 by a Canadian physician, Thomas McCrae, then at The Johns Hopkins Hospital, one year before John Auer (1875-1948), the US physiologist after whom they are named.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Auer rod
Today it means: clumps of azurophilic granular material that typically form elongated needles seen in the cytoplasm of myeloid leukemic blast cells. Full definition →