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Introduction. Probably epilepsy as a disease entity has a more ancient lineage than any other nervous disorder. The word by its etymology means to seize upon. We have in this designation as in that of apoplexy, to be struck down by the gods, a relic of the spiritualistic pathology at one time dominant. Its sacred significance as a malady is shown in the disease-possession of the priest of Apollo and the Sibylline, from which it derived the appellation of the sacred disorder. Due either to the resistless grasp of the convulsion, or because of the nonriddance of the mythological Shirt of Nessus which Hercules was said to have donned and which caused his final self destruction, the cognomen, the disease of Hercules, was favored. Or perhaps the very intensity of the muscle-knotting in the convulsion, which has strikingly been designated as a “clotted mass of movement” induced the ancients to compare the epileptic in the struggle of a seizure with the strength of the fabled god. The publicity into which epileptics thrust themselves in early Roman times whenever they visited important assemblies, such as the Comitia, gave it the name, the comitial disorder.
Not alone has epilepsy borne ancient names, but modern descriptions of the ordinary manifestations of the seizure hardly equal in pictorial vividness those of ancient poets. The following is by Lucretius, written two thousand years ago: