Rantings on the Sacred Disease

Aristotle was apparently the first to connect epilepsy and genius.

"Sometimes the same things that cause epilepsy result in giftedness. If you damage an area [of the brain] early enough in life, the corresponding area on the other side has a chance to overdevelop." Dr. Paul Spiers

"A temporal lobe focus in the superior individual may spark an extraordinary search for that entity we alternately call truth or beauty." Dr. Bear


And the epileptic geniuses are:

Edgar Allan Poe – Bud Abbott - Sir Walter Scott - Jonathan Swift - Lord Byron – Moliere - Alfred Lloyd Tennyson - Charles Dickens – Lewis Carroll – Fyodor Dostoevsky - Leo Tolstoy – Gustave Flaubert – Alexander the Great – Julius Caesar (Shakespeare knew that the Roman statesman suffered from the 'falling sickness and incorporated it into his play...He fell down in the market place, and foamed at the mouth, and was speechless.'– Napoleon Bonaparte – Harriet Tubman – Saint Paul- Joan of Arc (who also heard voices)– Soren Kierkagard – Truman Capote – Richard Burton –Ludwig Van Beethoven – Peter Tchaikovsky –Niccolo Paganini – George Frederick Handel- Chanda Gunn (US 2006 Women’s Hockey) - Danny Glover- Margaux Hemingway -Lenin died in Status Epilepticus - Neil Young- Jimmy Reed -Adam Horovitz- Karen Armstrong - Pius IX- Charles V- and Me

"But there is no bodily infirmity, not even leprosy or epilepsy, which cannot be caused by witches…. For we have often found that certain people have been visited with epilepsy or the falling sickness by means of eggs which have been buried with dead bodies, especially the dead bodies of witches, together with other ceremonies of which we cannot speak, particularly when these eggs have been given to a person either in food or drink." Excerpt from a 1494 handbook on witch-hunting and served as a guidebook for the Inquisition for 200 years, from the late 1400s until the time of the 1692 Salem witch trials in the United States.

The word epilepsy is derived from the Greek word epilambanein, meaning to seize or to attack. Hippocrates wrote the first book about epilepsy, "On the Sacred Disease," around 400 B.C.

Treatments:

Castor
As early as ancient Greek and Roman times, a resinous secretion from the scent glands of the beaver (castor sacks) was used as a remedy for the "holy disease": Castoreum. Up until well into the 19th century, this substance was widely used as a sedative and a remedy for convulsions and was to be found in every apothecary

The human skull (cranum humanum)
This was considered to be an effective remedy for treating the falling sickness throughout many eras: "Scrape a little matter from a human scull and administer this over a period of several months. If the patient is a man, the scull must be that of a woman, and vice versa" (folk remedy from Württemberg).

Mugwort (artemisia vulgaris)
In earlier centuries, this was the magical cure-all. Even in orthodox medicine mugwort was believed to be an effective remedy for epilepsy. Absinth, which has in it the amaroids from mugwort flowers, was also used to treat epilepsy.


Of the estimated 40 million people in the world with epilepsy, 32 million have no access to treatment at all - either because services are non existent or, just as importantly, because epilepsy is not viewed as a medical problem or a treatable brain disorder. Now is that anyway to treat a genius?

Saint Valentine, patron saint of the epileptics, of those who suffer from the falling down disease, yes, the disease with a thousand names, the superstitious, uneducated who think they are possessed by the devil, protect the 32 million.