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At some future time I hope to take up the epileptoid convulsions and show their relationship and variation from that of the mechanism of essential epilepsy.
In some cases it ensues directly on a psychic crisis before any nutritional change can have taken place. Finally, among the symptoms of possible physical origin, epileptoid attacks were described in two of our cases. This is chiefly of interest in that such phenomena are extremely rare in the benign psychoses.
In most cases the dancing has tended more to a species of 'jumping, and although this may be due to more careful observation has been accompanied by actions of a clearly epileptoid nature. One of the most famous of these outbreaks was that of the French Convulsionnaires, which lasted from 1727 to the Revolution. In 1727, a popular, but half-crazy priest, François de Paris, died.
Katatonia, according to Gray, is a cerebral disease of cyclic symptoms, ranging in succession from primary melancholia to mania, confusion, and dementia, one or more of these stages being occasionally absent, while convulsive and epileptoid symptoms accompany the mental changes.
Probably it rests upon the ancient tradition of oracles and sibyls, foaming at the mouth like champagne bottles. Inspiration meant originally demoniac possession, and to "modern thought" prophecy and poetry are both epileptic. "Genius is a degenerative psychosis of the epileptoid order."
One may safely say that had Swedenborg lived a century later, while he might still have gone through the same mental and physical experiences, he himself would have given a very different interpretation of them. St. Paul, Professor James points out, "certainly had once an epileptoid, if not an epileptic seizure."
Finally, under the heading of Physical Manifestations of Stupor, we must consider epileptoid attacks, of which there was a history in two of our cases, both of which have already been described in the first chapter of this book. During the two days when the stupor was incubating, she had repeated seizures of the following nature.
Brown-Sequard observed on several occasions in his own dark beard hairs which had turned white in a night and which he epileptoid.
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