"Epileptic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that are beyond the possibilities of state institutions, and that necessarily wait upon organized county efforts of effective sort. ... We do not know the deaf, the blind, the feeble-minded, the epileptic, the crippled, and the neglected or wayward boys and girls—their number, their names, and their residences in any county of the state ... because there is at present no local organization charged with the responsibility of accounting ...
— Community Civics and Rural Life • Arthur W. Dunn
... abstinence are the foundation of any successful treatment. It is probable that we have returned to Alexander's treatment of epilepsy much more nearly than is generally thought. There are those who still think that remedies of various kinds do good, but in the large epileptic colonies regular exercise, bland diet, regulation of the bowels, and avoidance of excesses of all kinds, with occupation of mind, constitute the ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... stood beside the grave in the cold, looking fixedly at it, but making no active demonstration whatever. This went on for about six weeks, and attracted a good deal of curiosity in the neighborhood. At length, in the latter part of February, Archibald had a sort of fit, apparently of an epileptic nature. On recovering from it, he called for a glass of milk, and drank it with avidity; he then fell asleep, and did not awake ...
— Archibald Malmaison • Julian Hawthorne
... drunkard or the debauchee. Intellectual blemish will almost always accompany material blemish. The soul will be attacked simultaneously with the body; and it matters but little whether the victim be imbecile, mad, epileptic, possessed of criminal instincts, or only vaguely threatened with slight mental derangement: the most frightful moral penalty that a supreme justice could invent has followed actions which, as a rule, cause less harm and are less perverse ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... may call it, which suddenly broke out amongst the poor Huguenots, began with epileptic convulsions. They fell to the ground senseless, foamed at the mouth, sobbed, and eventually revived so far as to be able to speak and "prophesy," like a mesmerised person in a state of clairvoyance. The disease spread rapidly by the influence of morbid sympathy, which, under the ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... not uncommon, especially with epileptic patients. Every mad-doctor knows cases in which there are what may be described as alternating consciousnesses with alternating memories. But the experiments of the French hypnotists carry us much further. In their hands this Sub-conscious Personality is capable of development, of tuition, ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead
... toward the close that Rayder came upon the floor with a fat widow milliner. He had taken a few drinks of gin and was trying to act kittenish when, in the midst of a cotillion, the widow fell to the floor in an epileptic fit. They bore the woman to an adjoining room, where she soon recovered, but it was such a shock to Rayder's nerves that he went out and braced up on a ...
— Where Strongest Tide Winds Blew • Robert McReynolds
... Doctor Masham, and giving him the details of the fatal event. It had occurred that morning. Mrs. Cadurcis, who had never slept a wink since her knowledge of her son's undoubted departure, and scarcely for an hour been free from violent epileptic fits, had fallen early in the morning into a doze, which lasted about half an hour, and from which her medical attendant, who with Pauncefort had sat up with her during the night, augured the most favourable consequences. About half-past six o'clock she woke, and inquired whether Plantagenet had ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... American Indians it is believed that those who are insane or epileptic are "possessed of devils." (Tylor, "Prim. Cult.," vol. ii., pp. 123-126.) Sickness is caused by evil spirits entering into the sick person. (Eastman's "Sioux.") The spirits of animals are much feared, and their departure out of the body of the invalid is a cause ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... medium in which they live, the elementary atoms that produce it. We went crazy over catalepsy; and with the eagerness that boys throw into every pursuit, we endeavored to endure pain by thinking of something else. We exhausted ourselves by making experiments not unlike those of the epileptic fanatics of the last century, a religious mania which will some day be of service to the science of humanity. I would stand on Lambert's chest, remaining there for several minutes without giving him the slightest pain; but notwithstanding these crazy attempts, ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... exuberant "coon" Who invented a horrible tune For a horrible dance Which suggested the prance Of a half-epileptic baboon. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Apr 2, 1919 • Various
... as to Numbers of Mental Defectives: Education Department Returns; Retardation, Problem of; Feeble-minded and Epileptic ...
— Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders • W. H. Triggs, Donald McGavin, Frederick Truby King, J. Sands Elliot, Ada G. Patterson, C.E. Matthews
... up, if it did not, from the very outset, appear made to be healthy and vigorous. Upon the same account, the women did not bathe the new-born children with water, as is the custom in all other countries, but with wine, to prove the temper and complexion of their bodies; from a notion they had that epileptic and weakly children faint and waste away upon their being thus bathed, while, on the contrary, those of a strong and vigorous habit acquire firmness and get a temper by it, like steel. There was much care and ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... barber's assistant, aged 35, whose father suffered from chronic alcoholism and was also said to have committed the same kind of offense as his son. The mother and a sister suffered nervously. From ages of 7 to 18 the subject had epileptic convulsions. From 16 to 21 he indulged in normal sexual intercourse. At about that time he had often to pass a playground and at times would urinate there; it happened that the children watched him with curiosity. He noticed that when thus watched sexual ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... was all tangled up with the two big placards and the rope that had held them together, and the whole business, Pee-wee, placards, rope and all, looked like a double sailor's knot having an epileptic ...
— Roy Blakeley's Camp on Wheels • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... would wonder in what play he figured, and what immortal legend justified his attitude and strange apparel! And then to go within, to announce yourself as an intending purchaser, and, closely watched, be suffered to undo those bundles and breathlessly devour those pages of gesticulating villains, epileptic combats, bosky forests, palaces and war-ships, frowning fortresses and prison vaults - it was a giddy joy. That shop, which was dark and smelt of Bibles, was a loadstone rock for all that bore the name of boy. They could not pass it by, nor, having entered, leave it. It was a place ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... grain I neither know, guess, nor care. I take it for granted, that Lord B———'surnagera encore', but by the assistance of what bladders or cork-waistcoats God only knows. The death of poor Mr. Legge, the epileptic fits of the Duke of Devonshire, for which he is gone to Aix-la-Chapelle, and the advanced age of the Duke of Newcastle, seem to facilitate an accommodation, if Mr. Pitt and Lord ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... the old belief in England was made in 1788. Near the city of Bristol at that time lived a drunken epileptic, George Lukins. In asking alms, he insisted that he was "possessed," and proved it by jumping, screaming, barking, and treating the company to a parody of the ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... straight shoulders and a grip of iron, and yet Taylor, that little village hound of an apothecary, said once you had microbes it didn't matter how strong you were—they were just as likely to be fatal as if you were a narrow-chested epileptic. ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... his leg Waiting until the shriek subsides. The epileptic on the bed Curves backward, ...
— Poems • T. S. [Thomas Stearns] Eliot
... at the door? What do you suppose I did? My boy, I took the governor's old house, that was unlet—the very house that he kept up at five thousand a year. Off I started in rare style, and sank my last cent in furniture. But it's no use, laddie. I can't hold on any longer. I got two accidents and an epileptic—twenty-two pounds, ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... at that moment he thought to see me fall to the ground in an epileptic fit; I trembled ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... again look upon the King of England's face uncoffined. Isabeau found her a madwoman. The girl swept opposition before her with gusts of demoniacal fury, wept, shrieked, tore at her hair, and eventually fell into a sort of epileptic seizure; between rage and terror she became a horrid, frenzied beast. I do not dwell upon this, for it is not a condition in which the comeliest maid shows to advantage. But, for the Valois, insanity always lurked at the next corner, and they knew it; to save the girl's reason the Queen was forced ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... his immortal ambition and ceaseless malignity may place him. In the first act, he should assume the tone of the fallen hero, which would by no means become him when in corporal possession of a Jewish epileptic, and bargaining for his pis aller in a herd of swine. Then again, as a leader of the army of St. Dominick, he should have a fiercer tone of bigotry, and less political finesse, than as a privy councillor in the cabinet of the Cardinal de Richelieu. ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... too common in childhood, and as to which a few words apart are needed. Usually a child epileptic for some years will carry the disease with it for a time, the length of which no man can set. The disease may be such as to ruin mind and body, or the attacks may be rare, and not prevent courageous and resolute natures ...
— Doctor and Patient • S. Weir Mitchell
... core that gives the point and the splendid audacity to French literature and art,—its vehemence and impatience of restraint. It is the salt of their speech, the nitre of their wit. When morbid, it gives that rabid and epileptic tendency which sometimes shows itself in Victor Hugo. In this great writer, however, it more frequently takes the form of an aboriginal fierceness and hunger that glares and bristles, and is insatiable ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... a far-reaching independence between the apparent mental variations and the seriousness of the brain affection. Light hysteric states may produce a strong absenting of the mind while severe epileptic conditions of the brain may be accompanied by very slight mental changes. Every neurasthenic state may play havoc with mental life, while grave brain destructions may only shade slightly the character or the intellect. ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... us—we scuttle. He hardly crosses the river to our side before we recross to the other. At last our enemy. Buxhowden, catches us and attacks. Both generals are angry, and the result is a challenge on Buxhowden's part and an epileptic fit on Bennigsen's. But at the critical moment the courier who carried the news of our victory at Pultusk to Petersburg returns bringing our appointment as commander in chief, and our first foe, Buxhowden, is vanquished; we can now turn our thoughts ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... See an account of the quasi- epileptic fits to which Syrians are subject and by them called Al-Wahtah in "The Inner Life of ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... young men even amused himself by incommoding me, as was then very easy; and that not from ill-nature, but mere clodlike incapacity to think, for he expected me to join the laugh. I did so, but it was phantom merriment. Later on, a man from Kansas had three violent epileptic fits, and though, of course, there were not wanting some to help him, it was rather superstitious terror than sympathy that his case evoked among his fellow-passengers. "Oh, I hope he's not going to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... most ghostly garret,—with the "Devil's footsteps" in the fields behind the house and in front of it the patched dormitory where the unexplained occurrence had taken place which startled those godless youths at their mock devotions, so that one of them was epileptic from that day forward, and another, after a dreadful season of mental conflict, took holy orders and became renowned ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... some years previously. Or, passing the house of a doctor when on a bus could produce a sudden outburst of anxiety, giddiness, and confusion; the patient had been taken into that house at the time of an epileptic attack. Or, showing photographs of the front could lead to an epileptic attack which was based on the memory of the time when the patient was wounded in the head; this has occurred on two separate occasions ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various
... have just implied that, unless these defects are relatively superficial, the scientific policy for treating these classes of defective individuals would be that of segregation in institutions. The feeble-minded, the chronic insane, the chronic epileptic, and other hopelessly defective persons, in other words, should be permanently kept in institutions where tender and humane care should be provided, but in such a way that they will not reproduce their kind ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... that in the case of an old epileptic who had been accustomed to take nitrate of silver as a remedy, the choroid plexuses were remarkably dark, and from their surface could be scraped a brownish black, soot-like material, and a similar substance was found lying quite ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... infirm temper, and the daughter's skillful use of it. He was unprepared for Flip's boldness and audacity, and when he saw that both barrels of the accusation had taken effect on the charcoal-burner, who was rising with epileptic rage, he fairly turned and fled. The old man would have followed him with objurgation beyond the door, but for the restraining hand ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... Willis's career afford a melancholy contrast to its brilliant opening. Health, success, prosperity—all had deserted him, and nothing remained but the editorial chair, to which he clung even after epileptic attacks had resulted in paralysis and gradual softening of the brain. The failure of his mental powers was kept secret as long as possible, but in November, 1866, he yielded to the entreaties of his wife and children, knocked off work for ever, and went home to die. His last few months ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... bowing down under epileptic fits, or something like, and I believe his brave old white head will soon sink into the village Churchsward. Why, OUR time seems coming. Make way, Gentlemen!—Yours ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... would sometimes preach before such Unitarian congregations, within walking distance, as cared to hear him. But as he would take no pay for his services his preaching contributed nothing toward the support of his family. Lloyd, who was epileptic and subject to moody variation in his attachments, was but an irregular housemate after the first few months, and his contribution to the household expenses was correspondingly uncertain. The future looked so dark in October, 1797, that in spite of misgivings and former ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Antarctic regions civil war would break out in a week. All records were broken by the Liberal Party, who rose as one man and cheered Mr. Tooth's declaration for ten minutes, many Members standing on their heads and waving their legs with epileptic fervour. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 8, 1914 • Various
... stood waiting behind him with all kinds of instruments and vessels in their hands. Cambyses had, only a few minutes before, recovered consciousness, after lying for more than an hour in one of those awful fits, so destructive both to mind and body, which we call epileptic. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... mortal enemy, but he shall forthwith fall! I hate him—I hate him—I hate him!" and as he pronounced these words, he struck the arm of the chair in which he was sitting violently, over and over again, and then rose like one in an epileptic fit. "To-morrow! to-morrow! oh, happy day!" he murmured, "when the sun rises, no other rival shall that brilliant king of space possess but me. That man shall fall so low that when people look at the abject ruin my anger shall have wrought, they will ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Brown-Sequard's discovery that an epileptic tendency artificially produced by mutilating the nervous system of a guinea-pig is occasionally inherited may be a fact of "considerable weight," or on the other hand it may be entirely irrelevant. Cases of this kind strike one as peculiar ...
— Are the Effects of Use and Disuse Inherited? - An Examination of the View Held by Spencer and Darwin • William Platt Ball
... that 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 there previously I had not put it there,—where had ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... I; "but are you aware, that in the midst of your delightful and entertaining conversation, you tumbled off your chair in an epileptic fit?—are you ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... Pliny, in his Natural History, B. 38, c. 4, says: "Despuimus comitiales morbos, hoc est, contagia regerimus," "We spit out the epilepsy, that is, we avert the contagion." This is said, probably, in reference to a belief, that on seeing an epileptic person, if we spit, we shall avoid the contagion; but it by no means follows that the person so doing must spit upon the epileptic person. We read in the first Book of Samuel, ch. xxi., ver. 12: "And David laid up these words in his heart, and was sore afraid of Achish, the King of Gath. ...
— The Captiva and The Mostellaria • Plautus
... course supplies instruction concerning the management and protective care of common emergencies. The instruction is practical and rational. It covers such emergencies as: sprains, fractures, dislocations, wounds, bruises, sudden pain, fainting, epileptic attacks, unconsciousness, drowning, electric shock, ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... ordinary inhibitions. He is fascinated by the loss of self-control—by the disturbance and excitement which this produces, often in the most respectable circles. He is beyond all his rivals the novelist of "scenes." His characters get drunk, or go mad with jealousy, or fall in epileptic fits, or rave hysterically. If Dostoevsky had had less vision he would have been Strindberg. If his vision had been aesthetic and sensual, he might ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... no shadow ever fell across the threshold; but, alas, there were every now and then padded rooms opening out of the passage; and as this was not a refractory ward, I asked the meaning of the arrangement, which I had fancied was an obsolete one. I was told they were for epileptic patients. In virtue of his official position as bandmaster, Herr Kuester had a key; and, after walking serenely into a passage precisely like the rest, informed me, with the utmost coolness, that I was in the refractory ward. I looked around for the stalwart attendant, who is ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... single lever—chemical dyes. Of even more vital moment is chemistry in the domain of health: the pitiful calls of our hospitals for local anesthetics to alleviate suffering on the operating table, the frantic appeals for the hypnotic that soothes the epileptic and staves off his seizure, the almost furious demands for remedy after remedy, that came in the early years of the war, are still ringing in the hearts of many of us. No wonder that our small army of chemists ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... eliminated, there remains hardly a single unquestionable example of acquired and transmitted peculiarities, beyond the famous experiments of Brown-Sequard, repeated and confirmed by other physiologists.[41] By cutting the spinal cord or the sciatic nerve of guinea-pigs, Brown-Sequard brought about an epileptic state which was transmitted to the descendants. Lesions of the same sciatic nerve, of the restiform body, etc., provoked various troubles in the guinea-pig which its progeny inherited sometimes in a quite different form: exophthalmia, loss of toes, ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... fire, my pen is a flash of lightning. I see stars, three stars, that is to say, one of the best brands plucked from the burning. I'm going to make your flesh creep. I'll give you fits, paralytic fits, epileptic fits, and fits of hysteria, all at the same time. Have I ever been in Paris? Never. Do I know the taste of absinthe? How dare you ask me such a question? Am I a woman? Ask me another. Ugh! it's coming, the demon is upon me. I must write three murderous volumes. I must, I must! What ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, April 11, 1891 • Various
... 9th of May, 1865, that Hamilton was in Dublin for the last time. A few days later he had a violent attack of gout, and on the 4th of June he became alarmingly ill, and on the next day had an attack of epileptic convulsions. However, he slightly rallied, so that before the end of the month he was again at work at the "Elements." A gratifying incident brightened some of the last days of his life. The National Academy of Science in America had then ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... thoughtful, and an ominous silence brought on a coolness of the strangest kind. The Presidente might have admitted that her "little girl" was subject to epileptic fits. The President, thinking that Cecile ought not to be present, signed to her to go. She went. Still Brunner said nothing. They all began to look at one another. ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... doubtless due to anemia of the medulla, because of the infrequent ventricular contractions. This anemia of the medulla and of the brain may also cause an epileptic seizure, or a partial paralytic seizure without any apparent paralysis. It is probable, however, that in these cases there may be coincident arterial disease in the brain. These sudden syncopal attacks are likely to occur when a patient suddenly rises ...
— DISTURBANCES OF THE HEART • OLIVER T. OSBORNE, A.M., M.D.
... Lavalette's narrative. When he saw Napoleon before his departure from Paris to the Belgian frontier, he found him suffering from depression and a pain in the chest; but he avers that, on the return from Waterloo, apart from one "frightful epileptic laugh," Napoleon speedily settled down to his ordinary behaviour: not a word is added as to his health. (Sir W. Scott, "Life of Napoleon," vol. viii., p. 496; Gourgaud, "Campagne de 1815," and "Journal ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... the papers. I followed him on his meditations, and to discuss ethnological points also. You see, I am verree small person here nowadays, in comparison with all his charms. By Jove, O'Hara, do you know, he is afflicted with infirmity of fits. Yess, I tell you. Cataleptic, too, if not also epileptic. I found him in such a state under a tree in articulo mortem, and he jumped up and walked into a brook and he was nearly drowned but for ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... peasant, half the physiognomy of a criminal, flat nose, little penetrating eyes, under lids trembling with nervousness, the forehead large and well-shaped, the expressive mouth telling of tortures without count, of unfathomable melancholy, of morbid desires, endless compassion, passionate envy. An epileptic genius whose very exterior speaks of the stream of mildness that fills his heart, of the wave of almost insane perspicuity that gets into his head, finally the ambition, the greatness of endeavour, ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... moment Paris is completely epileptic. A result of the congestion caused by the siege. France, on the whole, has lived for several years in an extraordinary mental state. The success of la Lanterne and Troppman have been very evident symptoms of it. That folly is the result of too great imbecility, ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... martyr to illness of an epileptic character; and Lady Mary gave him her sympathy. She was somewhat of a doctor—and being older than her friend, may have had the art of soothing sufferings, which were the worse because they were concealed. Whilst he writhed in pain, he was ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... lashes the neck of the victim. While the blows fall thick as hail, in front and behind, the head and corselet of the amorous swain are shaken by an extravagant swaying and trembling. You would think that the creature was having an epileptic fit. ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... short of her full complement of hands. Trade was good at the time, and one man who had joined had afterwards deserted, and another youngster had been taken to hospital only the day before we sailed. He had epileptic fits, and though the second mate (whose chief quality seemed to be an impartial distrust of everybody but himself, and a burning desire to trip up his fellow-creatures at their weak points and jump upon them accordingly) expressed in very strong language his wish that the captain had not sent ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... an epileptic fit. But you shouldn't joke about a serious matter like that," rebuked ...
— The Meadow-Brook Girls Afloat • Janet Aldridge
... probably some token of sorcery: he offers nocturnal sacrifices, vestiges of which of a suspicious character have been found; and he worships a little skeleton he has made and which he always carries about with him. His answer to these charges is as follows:—the child was epileptic and died without his aid; the poisons he has bought for purposes of natural science; the image he carries in his handkerchief is that of Plato's monarch (vous Basileus), devotion to which is only natural in a professed ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... of this inquiry also show that degeneracy among criminals is sometimes inherited and sometimes acquired. It is inherited when the criminal is descended from insane, drunken, epileptic, scrofulous parents; it is often acquired when the criminal adopts and deliberately persists in a life of crime. The closeness of the connection between degeneracy and crime is, to a considerable extent, determined by social conditions. A degenerate person, who has to earn his ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... said, "didn't I call to you not to be alarmed? Mr. Silk, here, has been seized with a—a kind of epileptic fit. Help him downstairs and call a chair for him. Don't stare; he will not bite again for a very ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... properly practise his art until he reaches manhood, the "medicine-man" (here, doctor) begins his candidacy in his eighth or tenth year. Of the "wizards," or "doctors" of the Patagonians, Falkner says, that they "are selected in youth for supposed qualifications, especially if epileptic" (406. 456). While among the Dieyerie of South Australia, the "doctor" is not allowed to practise before having been circumcised, or to enter upon the duties of his office before completing his tenth year, those young people become "doctors," who, as children, ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... 53. In August last was suddenly seized with epileptic fits, which continued to recur at uncertain intervals. Her belly had long been larger than natural, but without any perceptible fluctuation. Her legs and thighs swelled very considerably the beginning of this month, ...
— An Account of the Foxglove and some of its Medical Uses - With Practical Remarks on Dropsy and Other Diseases • William Withering
... a victim of that which I will call (seeing that science has not yet solved this problem) criminal neurosis, which is very analogous to epileptic neurosis, but which is not in itself sufficient to make one a criminal. Our adversaries had the idea that the mere possession of a crooked nose or a slanting skull stamped a man as predisposed by birth to murder ...
— The Positive School of Criminology - Three Lectures Given at the University of Naples, Italy on April 22, 23 and 24, 1901 • Enrico Ferri
... I," the King retorted. His hair hung damp on his brow, and he dried his hands continually; while his gestures had the ill-measured and eccentric violence of an epileptic. "Here, you! ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... Then I shouldn't have thought that you'd have—" but she dropped this line to take up another. "Yes, he's always been so. When he was a boy they were afraid he might be epileptic; and though he never was as bad as that he's always needed to be taken care of. He can do very wild and foolish things ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... was able indeed to go about, but he was like a worm-eaten plant, there seemed to be but little life within him. Old Hetfalusy, on the other hand, had altogether succumbed to his woe, he had taken to his bed, and was frequently tormented by epileptic fits. ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... instead of being alarmed by those frightful symptoms she related, took a more cheerful view directly. "Then do not alarm yourself unnecessarily," he said. "It was only an epileptic fit." ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... sometimes in Welsh and sometimes in English, but with the strange, weird intonation of a person in a dream. I have known something like this to take place before, but it has been in seizures of an epileptic kind, very unlike this case in their general characteristics. The mental processes seem to have been completely arrested by the shock, as the wheels of a watch or a musical box are stopped if ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... churchyard, will have some faint idea of how utterly exposed and defenceless poor Elsie now felt on the crowded thoroughfare of life. And the insensibility which had overtaken her, was not the ordinary swoon with which Nature relieves the over-strained nerves, but the return of the epileptic fits of her early childhood; and if the condition of the poor girl had been pitiable before, it was tenfold more so now. Yet she did not complain, but bore all in silence, though it was evident that her health was giving way. But now, help came to her from a strange quarter; ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 1 • George MacDonald
... tramps and vagrants. Constitutional amendments proposing women's suffrage were defeated this year (1895) in no less than nine States. Connecticut passed a law that no man or woman should marry who was epileptic or imbecile, if the wife be under forty-five, and another State for the first time awards divorce to the husband for cruelty or indignities suffered at the hands of the wife, while another State still repeals altogether its law permitting divorces for cruelty ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... presently he got furious, burst out of the anti-spasmodic or round-about style and called Alfred a d—d ungrateful, insolent puppy, and went stamping about the room; and, finally, to the young man's horror, fell down in a fit of an epileptic character, grinding his teeth and ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... Gas above my head Begins irascibly to flare and fret, Wheezing into its epileptic jet, Reminding me I ought to ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 - Edited by Sir Edward Howard Marsh • Various
... his admiration for the opera. It was expressed in a manner peculiar to Jernington that became almost epileptic, but it ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... Glory!" with a loud voice; and finally the younger one fell forward on her face, in a sort of trance. After a time she got back upon her seat; but I never witnessed such a state of excitement, except once, years ago, when I saw a young woman in an epileptic fit. All this was evidently in a sort of small camp-meeting style. August is the month for these meetings when out of doors; but this was a minor one. The woman in front grinned, and even laughed outright, having great hollows or ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter
... eight yards distant, all of them aiming toward her heart, she appeared to wake up. She shrieked, her eyes abnormally dilated by the horror of the reality that so soon was to take place. Her cheeks were covered with tears. She tugged at the ligatures with the vigor of an epileptic. ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... is falsification entirely disproportionate to any discernible end in view, engaged in by a person who, at the time of observation, cannot definitely be declared insane, feebleminded, or epileptic. Such lying rarely, if ever, centers about a single event; although exhibited in very occasional cases for a short time, it manifests itself most frequently by far over a period of years, or even a life time. It represents a trait rather than an episode. Extensive, ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... shout of laughter, but slowly Margot Poins fell across the Queen's knees. She uttered no sound, but lay there motionless. The sight affected Udal to an epileptic fury. ...
— The Fifth Queen Crowned • Ford Madox Ford
... two hundred and five pounds, and possesses only slight traces of intelligence. Teething spasms, occurring when they were about two years old, is the cause of their idiocy. Both are subject to frequent and violent spasms or epileptic fits. They need constant care and attention. Should Bertha's hand fall into the fire, she has not sufficient intelligence to withdraw it from the flames. Both are helpless as children. The State provides ...
— History of the Donner Party • C.F. McGlashan
... cunning, since he closed the doors softly, stole away in the shadows of the house and the avenue, and escaped to a distant wood unseen. From his withered face all feeling except horror had faded. Once deep in the wood, he fell under the trees like an epileptic, turned on his face, and dug the earth with hands and feet and face ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... nerve-centres of having at intervals attacks of convulsive discharge of nerve-force. Some years since I saw in consultation a case which well illustrates this point. A boy was struck in the head with a brick, and dropped unconscious. On coming to be was seized with an epileptic convulsion. These convulsions continually recurred for many months before I saw him. He never went two hours without them, and had usually from thirty to forty a day—some, it is true, very slight, but others very ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... chapter tells how to cure Ague, Intermittent Fever, Neuralgia, Sick Headache, Neuralgic Headache, Rheumatism, Dysentery, Epileptic Fits, Hysteria, Bleeding of the Lungs, Coughs, Bowel Complaint, Scrofula, Worms, Sore Eyes, Cholera, Piles, Warts, Corns, Deafness, Inverted ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... Vall was afraid the fellow would have an apoplectic stroke, or an epileptic fit. Mastering himself, however, he ...
— Last Enemy • Henry Beam Piper
... and silent, gazing at nothing, casting back her mind over the history of her life, and the misery which she had brought on all who belonged to her. Then at last she gave way, fell into tears, hysteric sobbings, convulsions so violent as for a time to take the appearance of epileptic fits, and was at last exhausted and, happily ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... Already weakened by the exile of the most sober and industrious of her population, the Jews; drawn into a foreign policy for which she had neither the means nor the inclination; instituting at home an economic policy which was almost epileptic in its consequences, she found her strength dissipated, and gradually sank into a condition ...
— The Buccaneers in the West Indies in the XVII Century • Clarence Henry Haring
... protervities that have already astonished us in the romances. There, too, is the same feverish strength, welding the fiery iron of his idea under forge-hammer repetitions - an emphasis that is somehow akin to weaknesses - strength that is a little epileptic. He stands so far above all his contemporaries, and so incomparably excels them in richness, breadth, variety, and moral earnestness, that we almost feel as if he had a sort of right to fall oftener and more heavily than others; but this does not reconcile us ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... has already recognised its public obligation to provide remedial aid in its provision for the education and lodging of the blind, the deaf and the dumb, and in the measures taken within recent years for the special education of the defective and the epileptic. The provision for these purposes may indeed be justified on the grounds that the expense of the education of children of the industrial classes so afflicted is beyond the powers of any one individual, or group of individuals, to supply, and that unless undertaken by the ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... oscillations of the hands when spread horizontally with the fingers and thumbs wide apart. This may in one way be accounted for by the difficulty that men have in obtaining wives, owing to the scarcity of women. Apoplectic and epileptic fits and convulsions were not of very frequent occurrence, but they seemed severe when they did occur. The fire cure was usually applied in order to drive away the spirits that were supposed to have entered the body, but, all the same, these fits at times resulted ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... world. A dozen or so weak pacifists, alone, surrounded, without means of being heard through any paper of standing, spoke honestly but not loudly, and this let loose a perfect frenzy of insults and threats. At the slightest contradiction the monster Opinion fell into an epileptic fit. ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... point at which all diseases, ailments and infirmities aim; and the death, the eternal death, of the soul is the point at which all sins aim. "Death is the wages of sin." "And ye are witnesses of these things." In relieving insane, idiotic, epileptic and dumb people of the mental ailments afflicting them, he always removed the cause by casting out the devils or evil spirits as the ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... but, shortly after, met again at Bologna. Francis going to Bologna, met a woman whose son was epileptic, and who came to beg the aid of his prayers. He wrote on a slip of paper some short but very devout ejaculatory prayers which he thought might be taken to the sick youth; they had no sooner been given to him, than ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... raised far above the earth, but not yet in heaven. Below is seen the earthly life, poor humanity struggling helplessly with pain, infirmity, and death. The father brings his son, the possessed, or, as we should now say, the epileptic boy, who ofttimes falls into the water or into the fire, or lies grovelling on the earth, foaming and gnashing his teeth; the boy struggles in his arms—the rolling eyes, the distorted features, the spasmodic limbs are at once terrible ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... it said that a child that was conceived when the father was in an exhilarated condition is apt to be epileptic, or nervous, or insane, and what not. This is also to be taken with a grain of salt. A chronic alcoholic has a defective germ-plasm, and his children are apt to be defective. But a glass of wine at a wedding banquet cannot affect ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... own hands. On one occasion Monsieur Martin, like a good Samaritan, was seen to raise a drunken man from the ground in a busy thoroughfare, take his bag of tools, support him on his arm, and lead him home. Another time when he saw, in a railway station, a poor and starving epileptic without the means to return to his distant home, he was so touched with pity that he took off his hat and, placing in it an alms, proceeded to beg from the passengers on behalf of the sufferer. Money poured in, and it was with ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... the epileptic or the mad. No, no, joy and health do not lie that way. If I were the scientist merely, I would say, 'Keep on, and I will stand by to observe your struggles.' But I am not, I am something else than scientist. It angers and agonizes me to see you tortured. I cannot ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland |
