I just accidentally stumbled across an interesting behavior in OVID Medline that neither I nor Kathy had ever noticed before. If you do a search on an author's name, but instead of using the "author" button, you use the regular "perform search" button, in many cases it actually finds MeSH subject headings that are appropriate for that author's work!
This is presumably just the regular *query words to subject heading* mapping algorithm at work. Mapping (as I understand it -- others can correct me if needed and you are inclined) measures the frequency of your query words in the database records, collects the records with high frequencies, and then brings back subject headings based on the frequency of the headings present in those records. This method apparently works just fine for an author query word as well as a more typical "keyword."
This trick certainly wouldn't work correctly for common names. But who knows, it might prove to be a useful tool if ever we needed to, e.g., "classify" the research areas of a given set of faculty...