In spite of epilepsy ; being a review of the lives of three great epileptics,--Julius Caesar, Mohammed, Lord Byron,--the founders respectively of an empire, a religion, and a school of poetry / by Matthew Woods.

  • Woods, Matthew, 1848-
Date:
1913
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: In spite of epilepsy ; being a review of the lives of three great epileptics,--Julius Caesar, Mohammed, Lord Byron,--the founders respectively of an empire, a religion, and a school of poetry / by Matthew Woods. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

    24/332 (page 18)
    paradox, on the part of the medical as well as lay com- munity who brand all epileptics as derelicts, because he personally knows many epileptics who do their use- ful life work with credit to themselves and benefit to the community. Because a man occasionally responds by a few minutes of unconsciousness or convulsions to certain known or unknown or but vaguely con- jectured causes, just as others respond by headache, neuralgia, rheumatism, and the like, to certain un- discovered or but conjectured condition, is no reason why the one should be regarded with almost super- stitious awe and alarm, looked upon askance, discour- aged out of the sunlight of beneficent work into re^ tirement and inactivity, compelled to live under a timid assumption of health, for fear of eliciting an- tagonism and terror, while the other, the man, for example, with a three or four hour attack of incapaci- tating headache every week, may declare his con- dition without fear of compromising himself. If he does not declare his condition with the expectation of polite sympathy he may at least do so with im- punity. The fact is that the person with periodic headache ought to be the one to hesitate about hazard- ing publicity, because his sickness may be the result of avoidable indiscretion or excess. His headache, like dyspepsia, may be but the remorse of a guilty stomach, while epilepsy is not always avoidable, because it is often due to — we know not what. In some cases one no more unfits a man for duty than the other. This statement, we are aware, is likely to be ac-