Origins
*Gurney* is an eponym β a common noun made from a proper name β and like many eponyms it has acquired a small folklore around it.βββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββ The standard reference works (OED, Merriam-Webster) treat the medical sense as a generalisation from the surname *Gurney*, most plausibly attached to the late-nineteenth-century American cart-maker Theodore Gurney and the firm J. T. Gurney & Sons, whose wheeled carts were taken up in hospitals and held onto the maker's name. The earliest clear attestations of *gurney* as a generic word for a wheeled hospital stretcher cluster in American English from around 1939.
What is firm is the broad shape: a trade name turned generic, in the same family as *jacuzzi*, *biro* or *xerox*. What is less firm is the precise individual. Older popular accounts name "J. R. Gurney" or "Dr. Gurney" as the inventor; these attributions do not survive close checking and are best treated as folk etymology. A separate suggestion that the word comes from the surname *Goldney* (a Bristol cabinetmaking family) is sometimes repeated, but the evidence is thin and the standard dictionaries do not adopt it. Disputed details should be flagged as such; the Gurney-surname route is the conservative reading and the one followed here.
Proto-Indo-European Roots
The surname *Gurney* itself is Norman-French in origin. It descends from *de Gournay*, a locative form referring to one of several places called Gournay in northern France (most prominently Gournay-en-Bray in Normandy). Carried into England after 1066, the name shed its preposition, anglicised its vowels, and settled into the patchwork of Norman-derived English surnames. Centuries later the same surname, now ordinary, would be borrowed back out of the personal naming system and into the vocabulary of medicine β a small reminder that the line between proper and common nouns is more permeable than it looks.
In modern usage *gurney* is principally American; British English more often says *trolley*. Both refer to the same object: a low wheeled stretcher with a padded surface, side rails and a head end that can usually be raised. A *stretcher* in strict use is the unwheeled, hand-carried version; once you put wheels under it, English calls it a gurney.