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Epilepsy   Listen
noun
Epilepsy  n.  (Med.) The "falling sickness," so called because the patient falls suddenly to the ground; a disease characterized by paroxysms (or fits) occurring at interval and attended by sudden loss of consciousness, and convulsive motions of the muscles.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Epilepsy" Quotes from Famous Books



... came he fixed his gaze upon a woman seated near the prostrate girl, and with a horrible outcry the victim leaped into the air and stiffened as if smitten with epilepsy. She fell against some scared boys, who let her fall, striking her head against the seats. She too rolled down upon the straw and lay beside her sister. Both had ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland

... of my mental collapse six years later, and of the distressing and, in some instances, strange and delightful experiences on which this book is based. The event was the illness of an older brother, who, late in June, 1894, was stricken with what was thought to be epilepsy. Few diseases can so disorganize a household and distress its members. My brother had enjoyed perfect health up to the time he was stricken; and, as there had never been a suggestion of epilepsy, or any like disease, in either branch of the family, the affliction came as a bolt from a clear sky. ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers

... presence of death, convinced him that he was the sport and prey of unseen and malignant powers. The strange and frightful diseases to which he was subject, the freezings and burnings of fever, the contortions of epilepsy, the sudden palsies, the darkness of night, and the wild, terrible and fantastic dreams that filled his brain, satisfied him that he was haunted and pursued by countless spirits of evil. For some reason he supposed that these spirits differed in power—that ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll

... of the poor little queen of Spain puts on more tragic colors; that it is pretended she has epilepsy, and she is to be made to renounce the throne, which, indeed, has been a terrific curse to her. And Heaven and Earth have looked calmly on, while the king of France has managed all this with ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... truth. "All the people quake like dew." The demoniacs of Palestine were not more shaken of old by internal possessions, than the heart of England is swayed to and fro under the action of this or similar problems. Epilepsy is not more overmastering than is the tempest of moral strife in England. And a new dawn is arising upon us in the prospect, that henceforth the agitations of peace will be more impassioned for the coming generation than the agitations of war for the last. But ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various

... duly received. I proceed to say that, since I settled in this town, my attacks of epilepsy[6] have occurred in the ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott

... he was struck by a fit of epilepsy,— though anyone less like an epileptic subject it would be hard to find. In my bewilderment I looked round to see what could be the immediate cause. My eye fell upon the sheet of paper, I stared at it with considerable surprise. I had not noticed it ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh

... your pleasant old gentle-man with the umbrella sounds very much like masked epilepsy. Ought to be under treatment. I ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay

... step, as it were, towards epilepsy. If that generation of sufferers had not been cured, it would have begotten another decidedly epileptic. What a frightful prospect! Think of Europe covered with fools, with idiots, with raging madmen! We are not told how the evil was treated and checked. ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet

... which Herodotus says Cambyses had been subject from his birth, and which was called "sacred" by some, can scarcely be other than epilepsy. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... are prone to fevers and blood diseases, especially in their early life. In youth they are also very liable to fits, epilepsy, severe headaches, often water on the brain, and ...
— Palmistry for All • Cheiro

... announces that she is about to devote herself to an enterprise that will rob her of her young husband's love. Mahomet means to conquer the world; this his wife has guessed, and she supports him by persuading the people of Mecca that her husband's attacks of epilepsy are the effect of his intercourse with the angels (chorus of the first followers of Mahomet, who come to promise him their aid, C sharp minor, sotto voce). Mahomet goes off to seek the Angel Gabriel ...
— Gambara • Honore de Balzac

... and now seems to be all right again. This makes the fourth that has had a similar attack. What can it possibly be? It cannot be hydrophobia, or it would have appeared among the grown-up dogs. Can it be toothache, or hereditary epilepsy—or some other infernal thing?" Unfortunately, several of them died from these strange attacks. The puppies were such fine, nice animals, that we were all very sorry when a thing ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen

... debility. The exciting causes therefore of asthenic disease, first impair the functions, then occasion a disturbed or inordinate action of them, giving many of them a false appearance; some of them, for instance, appear to be increased, for in hysteria and epilepsy, which are both diseases of debility, the action of the muscles seems to be preternaturally increased; but this depends chiefly on the accumulated excitability, which gives such a degree of irritability to the system, ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett

... negative, sensitive and subjective conditions which open the way to nervous prostration, control by other personalities (hypnotic influence, obsession, possession); the different forms of insanity, epilepsy, petit mal, etc. ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr

... some witch was in the churn. If the cattle died of an epidemic, or a disease unknown to the poor science of the day, it was the result of witchcraft. If a child or grown person was afflicted with some strange disease, such as epilepsy, the "jerks," "St. Vitus' dance," "rickets" or other strange nervous complaints, which they could not understand, they at ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick

... which was dumb, the healing of the person whom "the devil ofttimes casteth into the fire"—of which case one of the greatest modern physicians remarks that never was there a truer description of epilepsy—and various other episodes, show this same inevitable mode of thought as a refracting medium through which the teachings and doings of the Great Physician were revealed to ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... are that he won't hold out much longer; his health must have broken up after all these years. I don't know how I can stand it, if it is. When I think of all the things that may happen. Paralysis perhaps, or epilepsy—that's far more likely. He's just ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair

... evil, a remedial one, often entails mischiefs in other organs. "Apoplexy and palsy, in a scarcely credible number of cases, are directly dependent on hypertrophic enlargement of the heart." And in other cases, asthma, dropsy, and epilepsy are caused. Now if a result of this inter-dependence as seen in the individual organism, is that a local modification of one part produces, by changing their functions, correlative modifications of other parts, then the question here to be ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer

... the imbecile and half-witted may seem in comparison with the normal members of the community, it should always be remembered that feeble-mindedness is not an unrelated expression of modern civilization. Its roots strike deep into the social fabric. Modern studies indicate that insanity, epilepsy, criminality, prostitution, pauperism, and mental defect, are all organically bound up together and that the least intelligent and the thoroughly degenerate classes in every community are the most prolific. Feeble-mindedness in one generation becomes pauperism or insanity ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger

... cranial cavity and the brain occur not infrequently, and give rise to a variety of symptoms, imperfect control of voluntary movement, local paralysis, epilepsy, etc. Among the more common tumors are ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture

... Epilepsy, Fevers, diseases of the eye, nose, antrum, throat, muscles, cholera, all diseases of ...
— Scientific American magazine Vol 2. No. 3 Oct 10 1846 • Various

... reporting themselves (nuntiatio) the occurrence of adverse ones. The sign of most usual occurrence would be lightning—sometimes such an unexpected event as the seizure of a member of the assembly with epilepsy (morbus comitialis)—and we know to what lengths political obstructionists went in later times in the observation of fictitious signs, or even the prevention of business by the mere announcement of ...
— The Religion of Ancient Rome • Cyril Bailey

... aroused by hearing a roaring like that of a camel. I ran out of my tent to see what was the matter; and being guided by a noise to the servants' quarters, I found the kitchen assistant in convulsions, and the rest holding him down. It was a Syrian disease, a sort of epilepsy. They all wanted to tread on his back, but I would not let them do it. I got some hot brandy and restoratives, and gave him a good dosing between his clenched teeth. The result was he came to in an hour and a half, sensible, but very tipsy; but he managed to kiss my hand ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins

... but he knew how to give it a suppleness, a variety, and a freedom which were always wanting in Flaubert. The latter, in his best pages, is always strained. To use the expressive metaphor of the Greek athletes, he "smells of the oil." When one recalls that when attacked by hysteric epilepsy, Flaubert postponed the crisis of the terrible malady by means of sedatives, this strained atmosphere of labor—I was going to say of stupor—which pervades his work is explained. He is an athlete, a runner, but one ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant

... denoting the docility of the boy and his love of learning, or at least of the national lays; but he was also a hunter and a warrior. From his youth he had a thorn in his flesh, in the shape of a mysterious disease, perhaps epilepsy, to which monkish chroniclers have given an ascetic and miraculous turn; and this enhances our sense of the hero's moral energy in the case of Alfred, as in that of ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith

... McMahon, of Huntington, Indiana, has reported three cases of epilepsy in children caused by congenital phimosis that were entirely relieved by an operation without any subsequent return of the difficulty. One of the cases was in a boy ten years old, with very firm preputial adhesions and a high grade ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino

... successors; ophthalmia, affections of the stomach, abdomen, and bladder, intestinal worms, varicose veins, ulcers in the leg, the Nile pimple, and finally the "divine mortal malady," the divinus morbus of the Latins, epilepsy. Anaemia, from which at least one-fourth of the present population suffers, was not less prevalent than at present, if we may judge from the number of remedies which were used against hematuria, the principal cause of it. The fertility of the women entailed a number ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... noted that an officer of rank, whose family were friends and not very distant neighbours in the south of England of the late Rev. Lord Sydney Godolphin Osborne, experienced some singular phenomena. Lord Sydney was a great hypnotist, and cured, or believed he cured, many cases of epilepsy. The officer in question suffered at times from a tickling in his face, which annoyed him very much; it seemed to be more on the cheeks than in the ...
— Inferences from Haunted Houses and Haunted Men • John Harris

... out with sudden passionate crying. 'Oh, dunna, dunna!' she sobbed. So she did always at any mention of helpless suffering, flinging herself down in wild rebellion and abandonment so that epilepsy had been suspected. But it was not epilepsy. It was pity. She, in her inexpressive, childish way, shared with the love-martyr of Galilee the heartrending capacity for imaginative sympathy. In common with Him and others of her kind, she was not only acquainted with grief, but reviled ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb

... trembling, praying for the trumpet's call to rise from dust for ever! Ah, vision too fearful of shuddering humanity on the brink of almighty abysses!—vision that didst start back, that didst reel away, like a shrivelling scroll from before the wrath of fire racing on the wings of the wind! Epilepsy so brief of horror, wherefore is it that thou canst not die? Passing so suddenly into darkness, wherefore is it that still thou sheddest thy sad funeral blights upon the gorgeous mosaics of dreams? Fragment of music ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey

... England; but ours have quite frequently a decided pink tinge. The light and graceful growth, and the pinnately divided foliage, give the plant a special charm. In olden times, when it was counted a valuable remedy in hysteria and epilepsy, Linnaeus gave it its generic name Cardamine from two Greek words ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan

... Numbness is frequently complained of in fevers, and in epilepsy, and the touch is sometimes impaired by the dryness of the cuticle of the fingers. See ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin

... and paternal. The necessity for such instruction is somewhat indicated, in the effect upon the prenatal state, of such conditions as scrofula or struma, of various forms of tuberculosis and syphilis, of epilepsy, of rheumatism, and of insanity. These are only a few. We have to contend even with hereditary proclivity to some forms of the acute communicable diseases, such as diphtheria and scarlet fever and also ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various

... state of health is even more interesting to our inquiry than that of her ancestors, since most doctors persist in seeing in mediumship a neurosis, sister or cousin to hysteria or epilepsy. ...
— Mrs. Piper & the Society for Psychical Research • Michael Sage

... of experiences lead to the same conclusion. In temporary loss of consciousness the savage again sees proof of the existence of a double. With epilepsy or insanity there is offered decisive proof that some spirit has taken possession of the individual's body. Even in civilised countries this belief was widely held hardly more than a century ago. And both ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen

... now begin to go deeper—if I might speak of delirium, of slumber, of stupor, of epilepsy and catalepsy, and such like, wherein the free and rational spirit is subjected to the despotism of the body—if I might enlarge especially on the wide field of hysteria and hypochondria— if it were allowed me to speak of temperaments, idiosyncrasies, and constitutions, which ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... fits, in fact. According to the custom of that place, the boy was examined by the city physician, who required Captain Vesey to take him back; and Denmark served him faithfully, with no trouble from epilepsy, for twenty years, travelling all over the world with him, and learning to speak various languages. In 1800, he drew a prize of fifteen hundred dollars in the East Bay Street Lottery, with which he bought his freedom from his master for six hundred dollars,—much less than his market value. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various

... atmosphere of large cities, is neither dangerous in its consequences nor difficult in the execution." In this remark Dr. Dudley bore early testimony to the efficacy of aseptic surgery. He urged the trephine in the treatment of epilepsy and applied it in six cases—in four of which the disease was cured. The result in the two remaining cases is unknown, because the ...
— Pioneer Surgery in Kentucky - A Sketch • David W. Yandell

... they have warm ones according to the Roman custom, and they make use also of olive oil. They have found out, too, a great many secret cures for the preservation of cleanliness and health. And in other ways they labor to cure the epilepsy, with which they are ...
— The City of the Sun • Tommaso Campanells

... been made useful in a medicinal way. The doctors once prescribed peacock broth for pleurisy, peacocks' tongues for epilepsy, peacocks' fat for colic, peacocks' galls for weak eyes, peahens' ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn

... good to say so." Sir Henry spoke as though the tribute were no more than his due. "In my opinion, the symptoms of this young man point to epilepsy, and his behaviour downstairs was due to a seizure from ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees

... case in madness, imbecility, epilepsy, so-called total loss of memory through cerebral injury, hypnotism, sometimes in projection when the astral body gets detained, and also not infrequently in investigating peculiar instances ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell

... facts which seem to him to support this view. Among these are the phenomena of sleep (the reasons being too long to detail here); the fact that, although every individual brain is stored full of experiences, only a small area is illuminated by consciousness at any one moment; and the phenomena of epilepsy—concerning which Dr. Peterson speaks in ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington

... to grave nervous disease. Epilepsy at once comes before us, all the more significantly since it has been considered, more especially by Lombroso, to be the special disease through which genius peculiarly manifests itself. It is true that much ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis

... was meant for consolation, utterly failed, or rather aggravated the sufferings of the affrighted girl they bore, who once more struggled with a power that resembled the intense muscular strength of epilepsy, more than anything else. It literally required four of them to hold her down, so dreadfully spasmodic were her ...
— Fardorougha, The Miser - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... record a number of cases of idiocy, madness, and epilepsy caused by the unskillful provoking of hypnotic sleep. One case is sufficiently interesting, for it is almost exactly similar to a case that occurred at one of the American colleges. The subject was a young professor at a boys' school. "One evening he was ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus

... Dr. J. Crichton Browne has several times seen the blush extend as far down as the collar-bones, and in two instances to the breasts. He gives me the case of a married woman, aged twenty-seven, who suffered from epilepsy. On the morning after her arrival in the Asylum, Dr. Browne, together with his assistants, visited her whilst she was in bed. The moment that he approached, she blushed deeply over her cheeks and temples; and the blush spread quickly ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin

... p. 146.).—In Norfolk, a ring made from nine sixpences freely given by persons of the opposite sex is considered a charm against epilepsy. I have seen nine sixpences brought to a silversmith, with a request that he would make them into a ring; but 131/2d. was not tendered to him for making, nor do I think that any threehalfpences are collected for payment. After ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 201, September 3, 1853 • Various

... progenitors certain impressions upon their mental and moral, as well as their physical beings, which impressions, like an iron mould, fix and shape their subsequent destinies. Hysteria in the mother may develop insanity in the child, while drunkenness in the father may impel epilepsy, or mania, in the son. Ungoverned passions in the parents may unloose the furies of unrestrained madness in the minds of their children, and the bad treatment of the wife may produce sickly or ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols

... had possessions, and that he was not utterly ejected from the society and fellowship of men. For God could not only have deprived Cain of all these blessings, but he could have added pestilence, epilepsy, apoplexy, the stone, the gout, and any other disease. And yet there are men disposed curiously to argue in what manner God could possibly have multiplied the curse of Cain sevenfold on ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther

... periods of nervous unrest and unhappiness are apt to recur in a sort of cycle. This cyclical character of mental disturbance is often a marked feature. We see it in epilepsy and in what the French have called Folie Circulaire. We see it in the dipsomaniac, in the intermittency of his craving for drink and of his periodical outbursts, and we see it in ourselves in those periods of depression which recur so often, ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron

... containing no remedial ingredients and acting only as stimulants. An advertisement some time since, which claimed to cure not only tuberculosis but also cancer, falling of the womb, hair, or eyelids, insanity, epilepsy, drunkenness, disorderly conduct, and pimples was printed in many newspapers. This remarkable remedy was found by analysis to contain ninety-nine parts of water to one part of harmless salts. Many of the vaunted remedies ...
— Rural Hygiene • Henry N. Ogden

... touches the hands and lower limbs by night. Many diseases are caused by demons." According to Josephus, "to demons may be ascribed leprosy, rabies, asthma, cardiac diseases, nervous diseases, which last are the specialty of evil demons, such as epilepsy." Incantations were in use among the later Jews, and amulets of neck-chains like serpents and ear-rings were employed to protect the wearers against the ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten

... has raised distinctly the medical question as to Poe. He calls him "the mad man of letters par excellence," and by an ingenious investigation seems to establish it as probable that Poe was the victim of a form of epilepsy. But in demonstrating this, he attempts to make it part of a theory that all men of genius are more or less given over to this same "veiled epilepsy." And here he goes beyond the necessities of the case, ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop

... consequently liable to be rubbed or chafed." As we now have evidence that mutilations occasionally produce an inherited effect (94. I allude to Dr. Brown- Sequard's observations on the transmitted effect of an operation causing epilepsy in guinea-pigs, and likewise more recently on the analogous effects of cutting the sympathetic nerve in the neck. I shall hereafter have occasion to refer to Mr. Salvin's interesting case of the apparently inherited effects ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin

... is more difficult to cure than the Epilepsy or Falling- Sickness; yet several Instances have occurred where the most violent Degrees of it, have been cured, even in grown Persons, by taking a Dose of this Medicine regularly every Night and Morning for a considerable Time. The Dose must be regulated according to the Age of the Patient, ...
— An Account of the Extraordinary Medicinal Fluid, called Aether. • Matthew Turner

... of the keeper's could be found sufficiently to revile that cat. Indeed, the head-keeper went speechless, and nearly had epilepsy, in trying to describe it to the Court, and if it had done only one-half the things that the keeper asserted, it must have been a very remarkable beast indeed; the magistrate said so. In consequence Hawkley got ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars

... Lumley knew well, that it is most pernicious to public men to be considered failing in health,—turkeys are not more unfeeling to a sick brother than politicians to an ailing statesman; they give out that his head is touched, and see paralysis and epilepsy in every speech and every despatch. The time, too, nearly ripe for his great schemes, made it doubly necessary that he should exert himself, and prevent being shelved with a plausible excuse of tender compassion for his infirmities. As soon ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... time, however, he was attacked with convulsions, which were pronounced by the physicians examined before the board to be a form of epilepsy, and for this cause he was found to ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 8: Grover Cleveland, First Term. • Grover Cleveland

... succeed; you may win your great fight for self-mastery. But your children—the curse would hang over them. One and all, they too might suffer. Though you should hold to your self-mastery, there would still be a chance,—epilepsy, insanity, your own form of the curse! And should you again fall back ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet

... which is not an every-day occurrence within the experience of cattle-breeders, stock-farmers, horse-dealers, and dog and poultry fanciers. Nay, it is only the other day that an eminent physiologist, Dr. Brown-Sequard, communicated to the Royal Society his discovery that epilepsy, artificially produced in guinea-pigs, by a means which he has discovered, is transmitted to their offspring. [Footnote: Compare Weismann's Essays Upon Heredity, ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley

... published 'Clifton Grove' and other poems in 1803. Two volumes of his 'Remains,' consisting of poems, letters, etc., with a life by Southey, were issued in 1808. His tendency to epilepsy was increased by over-work at Cambridge. He once remarked to a friend that "were he to paint a picture of Fame, crowning a distinguished undergraduate after the Senate house examination, he would represent her as concealing a Death's head under ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron

... malformation, noise and concussion, mumps, and syphilis; affecting the nerve, paralysis, convulsions, sunstroke, congestion of brain, and disease of nervous system; and affecting brain center, hydrocephalus and epilepsy. Among unclassified causes are also adduced neuralgia, childbirth, accident, medicine, heat, rheumatism, head-ache, fright or shock, overwork, lightning, diarrhea, ...
— The Deaf - Their Position in Society and the Provision for Their - Education in the United States • Harry Best

... that I did act much as persons act from the ordinary promptings of curiosity, and from time to time even laugh very nearly as those do who are attacked with a convulsive sense of the ridiculous, the epilepsy of the diaphragm. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various

... mumps, or a horse of the staggers, or a knavish boy of the school, or an idle girl of the wheel, or a young drab of the sullens, and hath not fat enough for her porridge, or butter enough for her bread, and she hath a little help of the epilepsy or cramp, to teach her to roll her eyes, wry her mouth, gnash her teeth, startle with her body, hold her arms and hands stiff, &c.; and then, when an old Mother Nobs hath by chance called her an idle young housewife, or bid the Devil scratch her, then no doubt but Mother ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham

... her purpose, were apparently so chained to her by the goodies and favors which they received, that they were quite indifferent to the fate of their little friends. Such children, when brought to the psychopathic clinic attached to the Chicago juvenile court, are sometimes found to have incipient epilepsy or other physical disabilities from which their conduct may be at least partially accounted for. Sometimes they come from respectable families, but more often from families where they have been mistreated and where ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams

... humours that their eyes did steep Made them fear mischiefs. The hard streets were beds For covetous churls and for ambitious heads, That, spite of Nature, would their business ply: All thought they had the falling epilepsy, Men grovell'd so upon the smother'd ground; And pity did the heart of Heaven confound. 20 The Gods, the Graces, and the Muses came Down to the Destinies, to stay the frame Of the true lovers' deaths, and all world's tears: But Death before had stopp'd their cruel ears. ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe

... force by death, by sickness in hospital and camp, and by temporary depression, is not all that the army is subject to. Those who are laboring under consumption, asthma, epilepsy, insanity, and other incurable disorders, and those whose constitutions are broken, or withered and reduced below the standard of military requirement, are generally, and by some Governments always, discharged. These pass back to the general community, where they finally ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various

... defect, imbecility or idiocy. When he found families in which such defective children occurred, he then inquired as to their ancestry. Many of these children, he found, were reduced to a condition approaching epilepsy, or actually epileptic, because they themselves were alcoholic. Obviously such material can not legitimately be used to prove that the use of alcohol by parents injures the heredity of their children. The figures do not at all give ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson

... should be removed from the diet. Unless there is kidney defect, probably it need not be omitted, and a long salt-free diet is certainly not advisable. This salt-free diet has been recommended not only in nephritis and heart disease, but also in diabetes insipidus and in epilepsy. It is of value if there is edema in nephritis; it is of doubtful value in heart disease; it is rarely of value in diabetes insipidus; and in epilepsy its value consists probably in allowing the bromid that may be administered to have better activity in smaller doses, the bromin salt being ...
— DISTURBANCES OF THE HEART • OLIVER T. OSBORNE, A.M., M.D.

... and drawn back. There was a large bedsore; he could rest neither day nor night; and had no appetite to eat, but very thirsty. I was told he often fell into a faintness of the heart, and sometimes as in epilepsy: and often he felt sick, with such trembling he could not carry his hands to his mouth. Seeing and considering all these great complications, and the vital powers thus broken down, truly I was very sorry I had come to him, because it ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various

... nature pressed for some solution. In these solutions the breath, the blood, the name, the head, and even the hair generally played a part, but these would not in themselves explain the mysterious phenomena of sleep, of dreams, of epilepsy, of madness, of disease, of man's shadow and his reflection, and of man's death. By long familiarity with the scientific or quasi-scientific explanations of these things, we find it difficult to realise fully their constant fascination for early man, who had his thinkers and philosophies ...
— Celtic Religion - in Pre-Christian Times • Edward Anwyl

... to my epilepsy, sir, you had much better inquire of the doctors here. You can ask them whether it was a real fit or a sham; it's no use my saying any ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... have suffered from similarly recurring attacks of financial epilepsy; we have tried every expedient, and we have failed in each one; we have had three national banks; we have had thousands of chartered banks, under an infinity of regulations and restrictions against excesses and frauds; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various

... made an extended tour into western Asia in search of the chimerical "jet-stone"—a stone possessing the peculiar qualities of "burning with a bituminous odor and supposed to possess great potency in curing such diseases as epilepsy, hysteria, and gout." ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... strange and rocky country very far from India, and had seen the Emperor Theodore lying dead in Magdala, and had come back again in the steamer entitled, so the soldiers said, to the Abyssinian War medal. He had seen his fellow elephants die of cold and epilepsy and starvation and sunstroke up at a place called Ali Musjid, ten years later; and afterward he had been sent down thousands of miles south to haul and pile big balks of teak in the timberyards at Moulmein. There he had half ...
— The Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling

... the legend runs that they used to be raised off the ground, chairs and all, and float about in the most soothing way. Poor Peter of Alcantara was levitated in a less pleasant manner; "he uttered a frightful cry, and shot through the air as if he had been fired from a gun." Peter had a new form of epilepsy—the rising, not the falling, sickness. Joseph Copertino, again, floated about to such good effect, that in 1650 Prince John of Brunswick foreswore the Protestant faith. The logical process which converted this prince is not ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang

... membranes; or (2.) it may be required in cases of punctured and depressed fracture for the purpose of removing projecting corners of bone and allowing elevation of the depressed portions; or (3.) it is sometimes used to remove a circular portion of bone in cases of epilepsy in which pain or tenderness is felt at some limited ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell

... conquered and bound the strong man, and now He was 'spoiling his house.' They were parables of His higher work on men's souls, which He comes to cleanse from the oppression of demons, from the foamings of epilepsy, from impotence as to doing right. They were tokens of the inexhaustible fountain of power, and of the swift and equally inexhaustible treasures of sympathy, which dwelt in Him. They were His first trophies in His holy war, His ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren

... the question at the present time to have the majority of children given a more thorough test than that provided by the Snellen card. Where eye strains escape this test teachers will find evidence in complaints of headache, nervousness, sick stomach, chorea, or even epilepsy. The constant strain may also cause red or inflamed lids. Parents and teachers must be on the constant lookout for these symptoms of good sight persisting in ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen

... And then, 'Is it the baker?' 'No, Mr. Punch!' 'Who is it then?' (this in a squeak trembling with emotion and terror); and then the full, loud reply, booming like a judgement-bell, 'It is the Devil come to take you down to Hell,' and the form of Punch, with kicking legs, sunken in epilepsy on the floor,—all this was solemn and exquisite to me beyond words. I was not amused—I was deeply moved and exhilarated, 'purged', as the old phrase hath ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse

... could turn a Hellenic love-tale inside out, and wring the uttermost drop of fun from it without recourse to the devices of the booth at the fair, the false nose and the simulation of needless ugliness. The French play, comic as it was, did not suggest hysteria or epilepsy, and it was not so lacking in grace that we could not recall the original story without a shudder. There is no shattering of an ideal, and one cannot reproach the authors of the Belle Helene with what Theophrastus Such calls "debasing the moral currency, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various

... (2) Feeble-mindedness, epilepsy, some forms of insanity, and some venereal diseases are inheritable defects; those who suffer from them must refrain from having children. Studies of the "Jukes" family and the "Kallikak" family, and others, show convincingly ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake

... the tragedy of their trip around the world had been the development in Jean Clemens of a malady which time had identified as epilepsy. The loss of one daughter and the invalidism of another was the burden which this household had now to bear. Of course they did not for a moment despair of a cure for the beautiful girl who had been so cruelly stricken, and they employed ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... tobacco with opium, ether, mercury, and other articles of the materia medica. He calls tobacco a "fashionable poison," in the various forms in which that narcotic is employed.—He says, "The great increase of dyspepsia; the late alarming frequency of apoplexy, palsy, epilepsy, and other diseases of the nervous system; is attributable, in part, to ...
— A Disquisition on the Evils of Using Tobacco - and the Necessity of Immediate and Entire Reformation • Orin Fowler

... room I found a woman lying on the floor in a fit of epilepsy, barking most violently. She seemed to excite no particular attention or compassion; the women said she was subject to these fits, and took little or no notice of her, as she lay barking like some enraged animal on the ground. Again I stood in profound ignorance, sickening ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble

... hardness from oriental jade, in greater numbers among the Indians who live near the mouth of the Rio Topayos, than elsewhere. The Indians said that they inherited these stones, which cure the nephritic colic and epilepsy, from their fathers, who received them from the women without husbands.) A taste for the marvellous, and a wish to invest the descriptions of the New Continent with some of the colouring of classic antiquity, ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt

... preside. Two cases in particular were presented for examination. One was a question of the sudden cure of the youthful Adelaide Joly, and the other, that of little Leo Roussat. The latter, after a violent attack of epilepsy, in the year 1862, had to be carried to the grave of the late cure. One of his arms hung crippled at his side; his power of speech was gone, and his breathing so difficult that he was unable to retain the saliva in his mouth. After a short time spent in prayer at the grave ...
— The Life of Blessed John B. Marie Vianney, Cur of Ars • Anonymous

... the image some one is thrown down and has the life trampled out of him; on several occasions people have been caught by the wheels or the frame of the car and crushed, and at rare intervals some hysterical worshiper has fallen in a fit of epilepsy or exhaustion and been run over, but the official records, which began in 1818, show only nine such occurrences during the last ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis

... Articulations," "On Fractures," the treatise on "Instruments of Reduction," and "The Oath"; and the books considered almost certainly genuine are those dealing with "Ancient Medicine," "Surgery," "The Law," "Fistulae," "Ulcers," "Haemorrhoids," and "On the Sacred Disease" (Epilepsy). The famous Hippocratic Collection in the great libraries of Alexandria and Pergamos also comprised the writings of Pythagoras, Plato ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott

... agate set in gold, and studded With emeralds, sapphires, hyacinths, and rubies; The tongues of carps, dormice, and camels' heels, Boiled i' the spirit of Sol, and dissolved in pearl (Apicius' diet 'gainst the epilepsy); And I will eat these broths with spoons of amber Headed with diamant and carbuncle. My footboy shall eat pheasants, calvered salmons, Knots, goodwits, lampreys. I myself will have The beards of barbels served; instead of salads, Oiled mushrooms, and the swelling unctuous paps Of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... brave, Puffe, now we have the med'cine. My meat shall all come in, in Indian shells, Dishes of agat set in gold, and studded With emeralds, sapphires, hyacinths, and rubies. The tongues of carps, dormice, and camels' heels, Boil'd in the spirit of sol, and dissolv'd pearl, Apicius' diet, 'gainst the epilepsy: And I will eat these broths with spoons of amber, Headed with diamond and carbuncle. My foot-boy shall eat pheasants, calver'd salmons, Knots, godwits, lampreys: I myself will have The beards of barbels served, instead ...
— The Alchemist • Ben Jonson

... be no children when either mother or father suffers from such diseases as tuberculosis, gonorrhea, syphilis, cancer, epilepsy, insanity, drunkenness and mental disorders. In the case of the mother, heart disease, kidney trouble and pelvic deformities are also a serious bar ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger

... "certainly parts and wit; but he is the most wretched profligate man that ever was born, besides ridiculous; a painted face, and not a tooth in his head." on which the editor of that curious little book, Lord Hailes, remarks, "Lord Hervey, having felt some attacks of the epilepsy, entered upon and persisted in a very strict regimen, and thus stopped the progress and prevented the effects of that dreadful disease. His daily food was a small quantity of asses' milk and a flour biscuit. Once ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole

... whose father, mother, and six brothers and sisters were all mad; and in some other cases several members of the same family, during three or four successive generations, have committed suicide. Striking instances {8} have been recorded of epilepsy, consumption, asthma, stone in the bladder, cancer, profuse bleeding from the slightest injuries, of the mother not giving milk, and of bad parturition being inherited. In this latter respect I may mention an odd case given by a good observer,[13] in which the fault lay in the offspring, ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin

... seemingly above Catherine's head. At last he raised up his finger slowly and said, "Look, Cat—THE HEAD—THE HEAD!" Then uttering a horrible laugh, he fell down grovelling among the stones, gibbering and writhing in a fit of epilepsy. ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray

... with an apoplexy. Some of them perhaps are virtuosi, and delight in the operations of an asthma, as a human philosopher in the effects of the air-pump. Many a merry bout have these frolick beings at the vicissitudes of an ague, and good sport it is to see a man tumble with an epilepsy, and revive and tumble again, and all this he knows not why. The paroxysms of the gout and stone must undoubtedly make high mirth, especially if the play be a little diversified with the blunders and puzzles of the blind and deaf. . . . One sport the merry malice ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell

... a popular remedy against cramps consisted in "the father pricking himself in the finger and giving the child in its mouth three drops of blood out of the wound," and at Rackow, in Neu Stettin, to cure epilepsy in little children, "the father gives the child three drops of blood out of the first joint of his ring-finger" (361. 19). In Annam, when a physician cures a small-pox patient, it is thought that the pocks pass over to his children, and among ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain

... social factor does not enter there, because the social life is there the same in winter and in summer. This is, therefore, a practical proof of the influence of climate, and it is re-enforced by the fact that delirium and epilepsy in insane asylums are also more frequent in hot than in cold months. The influence of the telluric factors, then, cannot be denied, and the influence of the social factor intensifies it, as I have already shown by its most drastic and characteristic example, that of want. One can, therefore, understand ...
— The Positive School of Criminology - Three Lectures Given at the University of Naples, Italy on April 22, 23 and 24, 1901 • Enrico Ferri

... return for them in labor, and where they sometimes do not come at all. They are born, moreover, with diseased bodies, often with the taint of alcoholism in their veins; too often with some other inherited malady, such as epilepsy or unsound mind, as a direct result of parental excesses. How can we say that we 'do not let children suffer,' so long as alms keeps together thousands of these so-called homes in our large cities, and, worst of all, so long as into these homes thousands of helpless, ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond

... the same year, the Duke had an attack of epilepsy, which for a short time alarmed the public greatly for his safety, on account of his advanced age. Sir Astley Cooper and Dr. Hume were down at Walmer with him for a week, at the end of which time he recovered, greatly to the joy of the whole ...
— Maxims And Opinions Of Field-Marshal His Grace The Duke Of Wellington, Selected From His Writings And Speeches During A Public Life Of More Than Half A Century • Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington

... succeeds, and we start awake. This is sometimes accompanied with loud noise in the ears, and with some degree of fear; and when it is in great excess, so as to produce continued convulsive motions of those muscles, which are generally subservient to volition, it becomes epilepsy: the fits of which in some patients generally commence during sleep. This differs from the night-mare described in No. 3. of this Section, because in that the disagreeable sensation is not so great as to excite the power of volition ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin

... I believe,) I had a strong and sudden convulsive attack, which left me speechless, though not motionless—for some strong men could not hold me; but whether it was epilepsy, catalepsy, cachexy, or apoplexy, or what other exy or epsy, the doctors have not decided; or whether it was spasmodic or nervous, &c.; but it was very unpleasant, and nearly carried me off, and all that. On Monday, they put leeches to my temples, no difficult matter, but ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore

... statistics of a large number of families, more than two hundred descended from drunkards, show that a very large portion of them gave undoubted proof of well-marked degeneration. This was plain in the unusual prevalence of infant mortality, convulsions, epilepsy, hysteria, fatal brain diseases, ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell

... dam, Malbe dam, found in The Creation and in St. Meriasek, are considered by Prof. Loth to be maledictions referring to the French expression Mal beau or Beau mal, a euphonism for epilepsy, so that Malbe dam has no connection with the similar sound of part of it in English, but only means ...
— A Handbook of the Cornish Language - chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature • Henry Jenner



Words linked to "Epilepsy" :   epileptic, Lafora's disease, epileptic seizure, petit mal, photogenic epilepsy, grand mal, sensory epilepsy, epilepsia minor, myoclonus epilepsy, reflex epilepsy, akinetic epilepsy, encephalopathy, grand mal epilepsy, posttraumatic epilepsy



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