Named in honour of William Little, the English surgeon who described what became known as 'Little's disease', a spastic paralysis of both lower limbs which then became known as infantile cerebral palsy.

In 1843, in a series of lectures at the Orthopaedic Institution (published in 1855 as Lectures on the Deformities of the Human Frame ) he described what became known as 'Little's disease', a spastic paralysis of both lower limbs secondary to infantile cerebral palsy.