On the Causes and Symptoms of Chronic Diseases (1.4)

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.