Gadolinium is usually counted the first element deliberately named after a real person, honouring Johan Gadolin, whose analysis of the black Ytterby mineral in 1794 opened the whole tangled field of rare-earth chemistry. The tribute is fitting, for the ore that bears his name, gadolinite, was the source from which yttrium and a succession of other lanthanides were eventually drawn. This personal naming set a precedent later followed on a grand scale among the synthetic heavy elements, which commemorate Curie, Einstein, Fermi, Mendeleev and others.
Gadolinium has no myth or alchemical past; its distinction is to carry the name of the man who first parted the curtain on the rare earths, and, in modern medicine, to light up the soft tissues of the body under the scanner. Gadolin himself never lived to see the element bearing his name isolated: he died in 1852, nearly three decades before Marignac drew gadolinium from the mineral gadolinite in 1880, so the honour was entirely posthumous, resting on his foundational 1794 analysis of the black Ytterby ore rather than on any direct role in the later discovery. Gadolin held the chair of chemistry at Turku until his retirement in 1822, leaving the rare-earth field he had opened to the generation of chemists who came after him.