CHAPTER IV. ON EPILEPSY
EPILEPSY is an illness of various shapes and horrible; in the
paroxysms, brutish, very acute, and deadly; for, at times, one
paroxysm has proved fatal. Or if from habit the patient can
endure it, he lives, indeed, enduring shame, ignominy, and
sorrow: and the disease does not readily pass off, but fixes its
abode during the better periods and in the lovely season of
life. It dwells with boys and young men; and, by good
fortune, it is sometimes driven out in another more advanced
period of life, when it takes its departure along with the
beauty of youth; and then, having rendered them deformed,
it destroys certain youths from envy, as it were, of their
beauty, either by loss of the faculties of a hand, or by the
distortion of the countenance, or by the deprivation of some
one sense. But if the mischief lurk there until it strike root,
it will not yield either to the physician or the changes of age,
so as to take its departure, but lives with the patient until
death. And sometimes the disease is rendered painful by its
convulsions and distortions of the limbs and of the face; and
sometimes it turns the mind distracted. The sight of a
paroxysm is disagreeable, and its departure disgusting with
spontaneous evacuations of the urine and of the bowels.
But also it is reckoned a disgraceful form of disease; for it
is supposed, that it is an infliction on persons who have sinned
against the Moon: and hence some have called it the Sacred
Disease, and that for more reasons than one, as from the
greatness of the evil, for the Greek word
ἱερὸς also signifies
great; or because the cure of it is not human, but divine; or
from the opinion that it proceeded from the entrance of a
demon into the man: from some one, or all these causes
together, it has been called Sacred.
Such symptoms as accompany this disease in its acute form
have been already detailed by me. But if it become inveterate,
the patients are not free from harm even in the intervals,
but are languid, spiritless, stupid, inhuman, unsociable, and
not disposed to hold intercourse, nor to be sociable, at any
period of life; sleepless, subject to many horrid dreams, without
appetite, and with bad digestion; pale, of a leaden colour;
slow to learn, from torpidity of the understanding and of the
senses; dull of hearing; have noises and ringing in the head;
utterance indistinct and bewildered, either from the nature of
the disease, or from the wounds during the attacks; the
tongue is rolled about in the mouth convulsively in various
ways. The disease also sometimes disturbs the understanding,
so that the patient becomes altogether fatuous. The cause of
these affections is coldness with humidity.
