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They must disbelieve all Philosophical Transactions containing the records of painful and careful inquiry into now familiar disorders of the senses of seeing and hearing, and into the wonders of somnambulism, epilepsy, hysteria, miasmatic influence, vegetable poisons derived by whole communities from corrupted air, diseased imitation, and moral infection.
In the next 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.
And thus it is that the cerebral affection which fell upon the parent is represented in one child by insanity, in another by idiocy, in another by epilepsy, in another by gross eccentricity, in another by moral perversities, in another by ill-balanced intellect, each and all implying a brain more or less vitiated by the parental infirmity. There is nothing strange in all this diversity of result.
While the German doctrine was the plaything merely of hysterical and supersensitive persons, like Carlyle and Nietzsche, it mattered little to the world of politics. An excitable man, of vivid imagination and invalid constitution, like Carlyle, feels a natural predilection for the cult of the healthy brute. Carlyle's English style is itself a kind of epilepsy.
"It is beyond a doubt," writes F. C. Conybeare, "that Jesus regarded fever, epilepsy, madness, deafness, blindness, rheumatism, and all the other weaknesses to which flesh is heir, as the distinct work of evil spirits. The storm-wind which churned the sea or inland lake into fury is equally an evil spirit in the Gospel story.
This salt-free diet has been recommended not only in nephritis and heart disease, but also in diabetes insipidus and in epilepsy.
The following singular case of epilepsy is narrated by M.W. Leblanc: A dog of small size, three years old, was very subject to those epileptic fits that are so frequent among dogs.
Persons subject to nervous affections, from simple epilepsy to madness and idiocy, were and still are supposed to be inspired, and endowed with the power of prophesying and working miracles; they are also venerated for relating the strange visions presented to them in the crisis of their disorder.
The unaccountable fascination of this case of mania, subinduced by epilepsy, is not to be resisted; Karshish would write, if he could, of more important matters than the madman of Bethany; he would record his discoveries in scalp-disease, describe the peculiar qualities of Judea's gum-tragacanth, and disclose the secret of those virtues derived from the mottled spiders of the tombs.
Every medical man is acquainted with the close relation that exists between epilepsy and all kinds of hallucinations and delusions, and it would be more than surprising if in an environment where the religious interpretation of things is paramount, or with a patient of strong religious convictions, these delusions did not take a religious form.
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