"Epileptic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 severe. Medicines ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... 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 ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... your choice, my friend. This engagement has to be broken off; and the Mannerings don't want to be too hard on you. Was it broken through D, T. or epileptic fits? Sorry I can't offer you a better exchange unless you'd prefer hereditary insanity. Say the word and I'll tell 'em it's fits. All Simla knows about that scene on the Ladies' Mile. Come! I'll give you five minutes ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... 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 exceptions ...
— Are the Effects of Use and Disuse Inherited? - An Examination of the View Held by Spencer and Darwin • William Platt Ball
... impetuous Gas above my head Begins irascibly to flare and fret, Wheezing into its epileptic jet, Reminding me I ought ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 - Edited by Sir Edward Howard Marsh • Various
... lived in the house, an unimpeachable ghost. All Miss Pew's young ladies believed firmly in that ghost; and there was a legend of a frizzy-haired girl from Barbados who had seen the ghost, and had incontinently gone out of one epileptic fit into another, until her father had come in a fly—presumably from Barbados—and carried her away for ever, ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... from the 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 ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... the 118 removed into it from Wilson Street, had there been no changes. But of this number two young children died, two Orphans were taken back by their relatives, who were by that time able to provide for them. One boy was sent back to his relations, partly on account of epileptic fits, and partly on account of oft-repeated great disobedience, in order that we might thus make an example of him for the benefit of the rest. Three boys were sent to their relatives, as ready to be apprenticed, four boys were apprenticed at the ...
— A Narrative of Some of the Lord's Dealings with George Mueller - Written by Himself, Fourth Part • George Mueller
... tenants, and would order Gaffer Jones to be converted, as she would order Goody Hicks to take a James's powder, without appeal, resistance, or benefit of clergy. My Lord Southdown, her late husband, an epileptic and simple-minded nobleman, was in the habit of approving of everything which his Matilda did and thought. So that whatever changes her own belief might undergo (and it accommodated itself to a prodigious variety of opinion, taken from all sorts of doctors ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... dawned on him that the rump of an officer and nobleman had been bust in by the hobnailed socks of a poor private! He went off chattering like a woman and wriggling like an epileptic—" ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... the natures of their lords rebel; Bring oil to fire, snow to their colder moods; Renege, affirm, and turn their halcyon beaks With every gale and vary of their masters, Knowing naught, like dogs, but following.— A plague upon your epileptic visage! Smile you my speeches, as I were a fool? Goose, an I had you upon Sarum plain, I'd drive ye ...
— The Tragedy of King Lear • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... this for eighteen years, "had," says the evangelist, "a spirit of infirmity;" and Jesus Christ, after having healed her, says "that Satan held her bound for eighteen years;" and in another place, it is said that a lunatic or epileptic person was possessed by the demon. It is clear, from what is said by St. Matthew and St. Luke,[431] that he was attacked by epilepsy. The Saviour cured him of this evil malady, and by that means took from the demon the opportunity of tormenting him still more; as David, by dissipating with the ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... for physical and spiritual culture must be provided, and the State must ensure justice and the right to achieve success. We know that—generally speaking—these conditions do not exist. We know that the dregs of the human species—the blind, the deaf-mute, the degenerate, the imbecile, the epileptic, the criminal even,—are better protected by organized charity and by the State than are the deserving fit and healthy. We know that in the slums thousands of desirable children waste their vitality in the battle for existence, and we ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.
... moment at the station where she alighted for the world-famed tomb, she glanced back hurriedly at a native who placed himself between her and an unsightly epileptic; and she looked back once again as her intuition rapped out a message she did not grasp, and her ayah suddenly besought ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... Bartja and his friends stood before the king who had just recovered from an epileptic fit. A few hours earlier he would have killed Bartja with his own hands. Now he was ready to lend an ear to both sides. Boges first related that he was with the Achaemenidae, looking at the blue lily, and called Kandaules to inquire if everything was in order. On ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... of 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 ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... 'The son is epileptic and can earn nothing, and is, in addition, a great eater. He is a good man and a Christian. As we entered, the son and daughter went out. The mother and little daughter were baptized. The father did not wish his big daughter baptized. When she is married she will get a heathen mother-in-law, ...
— James Gilmour of Mongolia - His diaries, letters, and reports • James Gilmour
... to rage, pain and madness. He was not without 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 in convulsions ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... seaman's trick of thinking of the weather first thing in the morning, and this little thing wrought a change in my view of him. His madness was seemingly like that of an epileptic, and when it passed he was a simple creature with a longing ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... 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, and the envy that small-mindedness begets.... His heroes are not only poor and crave ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... 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 been just formed. A list of foreign Associates ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... 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, ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... sooner or later. In Wentworth Street, amid dead cabbage-leaves, and mud, and refuse, and orts, and offal, stood the woe-begone Meckisch, offering his puny sponges, and wooing the charitable with grinning grimaces tempered by epileptic fits at judicious intervals. A few inches off, his wife in costly sealskin jacket, purchased salmon with a Maida Vale manner. Compressed in a corner was Shosshi Shmendrik, his coat-tails yellow with the yolks of dissolving eggs from a bag in his pocket. He asked her frantically, if she had ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... wine party he was the life of everything, as he sat up there between Diogenes—whom he kept in a constant sort of mild epileptic fit, from laughter, and wine going the wrong way (for whenever Diogenes raised his glass Blake shot him with some joke)—and the Captain who watched him with the most undisguised admiration. A singular contrast, the two ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... of a young man of twenty-three, who showed a psychopathic personality with tainted heredity on the paternal side. He was subject to convulsive attacks, which were regarded as hysterical and not epileptic. In his intelligence he was above the average. He was engaged to a young woman, and because she refused to marry him, he at first contemplated to take his life, but later shot at her three times ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... causes of insanity are heredity and stress or strain. Lunacy is not infrequent in children of epileptic, alcoholic, or insane parents, and those born of parents suffering from nervous disease frequently are in such condition that shock, intense emotion, dissipation, or exhausting diseases render them insane. Drinking alcoholic beverages is the most ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume II (of VI) • Various
... a change took place for the better, and the child began slowly to mend. For years, however, that struggle for life left its traces on her, not only in serious lung-delicacy but also in a form of epileptic fits. In her play she would suddenly stop, and become fixed for about a minute, and then go on again as though nothing had occurred. On her mother a ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... is 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 ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... 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 ...
— Archibald Malmaison • Julian Hawthorne
... usually felt so, he was periodically visited by severe attacks of acute "breast pains" which, as the months passed, increased in frequency and severity. He was alarmed and distressed—not on his own account, but because of his daughter Jean—a handsome girl, who had long been subject to epileptic seizures. In case of his death he feared that Jean would be without permanent anchorage, his other daughter, Clara—following her marriage to Ossip Gabrilowitsch in October —having taken up ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... back with an impotent scream, and the man Pietro caught her in his arms. Quivering and convulsed, she writhed in an epileptic fit. ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... it. You had one and he was a lunatic or a epileptic or an epizootic or somethin', and lived in a hospital or a palace or a jail, and he was worth four millions or forty, I forget which, and fell out of an automobile or out of a balloon or out of bed—anyhow, ...
— Cap'n Dan's Daughter • Joseph C. Lincoln
... of sixteen persons, eight were born deaf and dumb, and one at least of this family transmitted the defect as far as the third generation." ("Heredity and Human Progress.") A murderer was the son of a drunkard; of three brothers, one was normal, one a drunkard, and the third was a criminal epileptic. Of his three paternal uncles, one was a murderer, one a half idiot, and one a violent character. Of his four cousins, sons of the latter, two were half idiots, one a complete idiot, and the other ...
— The Fertility of the Unfit • William Allan Chapple
... altered since I was present at the representation of that performance; but certain I am, when I beheld him in that critical conjuncture, his behaviour appeared to me so uncouth, that I really imagined he was visited by some epileptic distemper; for he stood tottering and gasping for the space of two minutes, like a man suddenly struck with the palsy; and, after various distortions and side-shakings, as if he had got fleas in his doublet, heaved up from his lungs the letter I, like a ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... a 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 obliged to give vent to his ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... fashionable cider! An epileptic licorice-water. I would give all the cellars of Epernay and Ai for a single Burgundian cask. Besides, we have neither grisettes to seduce, nor a vaudeville to ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... happened to look up. By the rails of the pier above she saw her husband. He was leaning there, looking intently down; his tall broad figure made the people on each side of him seem insignificant. The clean-shaved, square-cut face, with those almost epileptic, forceful eyes, had a stillness and intensity beside which the neighbouring faces seemed to disappear. She saw him very clearly, even noting the touch of silver in his dark hair, on each side under ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... has occurred until now to recall it to my mind; but it is a fact of too serious importance to be overlooked at this crisis. Reflect now, that there is only one frail life between me and the heirship of my father's earldom—the life of my epileptic half-brother Francis, who, inheriting the malady of his beautiful young mother who perished in her youth, has declared that he will never marry to perpetuate such ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... 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, ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... doctor—the pride of the whole family and "a saint" as the peasants call her—really is remarkable. She has a tumour on the brain, and in consequence of it she is totally blind, has epileptic fits and constant headaches. She knows what awaits her, and stoically with amazing coolness speaks of her approaching death. In the course of my medical practice I have grown used to seeing people who were soon going to die, and I have always felt strange when ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... 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, ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... and poverty are capital instances of social problems 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 ...
— Community Civics and Rural Life • Arthur W. Dunn
... 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 ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... 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 ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... confidence. I had heard that the Italians were a nervous people. It does not apply to this part of Italy. As I approached the danger spot I saw rows of large, fat gentlemen with long thin black cigars leaning against walls in the sunshine. The general atmosphere would have steadied an epileptic. Italy is perfectly sure of herself in this quarter. Finally, after a long drive of winding gradients, always beside the Adige, we reached Ala, where we interviewed the Commander of the Sector, a man who has done splendid ...
— A Visit to Three Fronts • Arthur Conan Doyle
... harmed him," she said. "I was going to, yes—and then myself—but he didn't give me a chance. He fell down in a fit." She nodded down toward the man who lay writhing at their feet. "I frightened him," she said, "and he fell in a fit. He's an epileptic, you know. Didn't ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... minds so predisposed, might seem to indicate that a crime had been perpetrated. The fourteen Doctors who deliberated on the King's case contradicted each other and themselves. Some of them thought that his fit was epileptic, and that he should be suffered to have his doze out. The majority pronounced him apoplectic, and tortured him during some hours like an Indian at a stake. Then it was determined to call his complaint a fever, and to administer doses of bark. ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... citizens of this country, and we can well afford to insist upon adequate scrutiny of the character of those who are thus proposed for future citizenship. There should be an increase in the stringency of the laws to keep out insane, idiotic, epileptic, and pauper immigrants. But this is by no means enough. Not merely the Anarchist, but every man of Anarchistic tendencies, all violent and disorderly people, all people of bad character, the incompetent, the lazy, the vicious, ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... about to undertake; and when we are to succeed they order us on, and when we are not they make signs to us to desist." Their mode [60] of ascertaining which of their ancestors interested himself most in their affairs was commonly this, that whenever a person talked incoherently in a fever or an epileptic fit, the spirit of one or other of his ancestors was supposed to be upon him. If they were in doubt as to whose spirit it was, one of them threw down some grains of wheat or coloured glass beads, a pinch at a time, saying the name of the ancestor he supposed the most likely ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... would burst into tears, and it was not till some half-hour had passed that she grew calm as usual. Her father, knowing her hysterical tendencies, was always excessively anxious about this trait in his youngest girl, and feared the attack to be a species of epileptic fit. Not so her sister Julia. Julia had found Out what was the cause. At the moment before the jumping, only an exceptionally sensitive ear situated in the chimney-nook could have caught from down the flue the beat of a man's footstep along the highway without. ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... another to these unknown subtleties, and he had need of all his strength to refrain from manifesting by some glad hurrah, by some untimely effusion of gestures and speech, the impulse of physical gaiety which pervaded his whole being, as happens to those great mountain dogs that are thrown into epileptic fits of madness by the inhaling of ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... most sanctified rule of life did he shine in so many and so great miracles that he appeared second to no other saint. For the blind and the lame, the deaf and the dumb, the palsied, the lunatic, the leprous, the epileptic, all who labored under any disease, did he in the name of the Holy Trinity restore unto the power of their limbs and unto entire health; and in these good deeds was he daily practised. Thirty and three dead men, some of whom had many years been buried, did this great reviver ...
— The Most Ancient Lives of Saint Patrick - Including the Life by Jocelin, Hitherto Unpublished in America, and His Extant Writings • Various
... 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 ...
— Where Strongest Tide Winds Blew • Robert McReynolds
... of inspiration or possession is commonly invoked to explain all abnormal mental states, particularly insanity or conditions of mind bordering on it, so that persons more or less crazed in their wits, and particularly hysterical or epileptic patients, are for that very reason thought to be peculiarly favoured by the spirits and are therefore consulted as oracles, their wild and whirling words passing for the revelations of a higher power, ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... has been suffering from epileptic crises. Several doctors had told me that about the age of 14 or 15 they would disappear or become worse. Having heard of you, I sent her to you from the end of December till May. Now her cure is complete, for during six months she ...
— Self Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion • Emile Coue
... beginning to get warm, and I of course to get better. There has been a good deal of nervous headache here this Ramadan. I had to attend the Kadee, and several more. My Turkish neighbour at Karnac has got a shaitan (devil), i.e. epileptic fits, and I was sent for to exorcise him, which I am endeavouring to do with nitrate of silver, etc.; but I fear imagination will kill him, so I advise him to go to Cairo, and leave the devil-haunted house. I have this minute killed the ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... day, perhaps, nothing can be elicited. But after some minutes the stupor seems as it were less embarrassing to the patient, who appears less heavily slumbrous, and breathes lighter again; or it may be the reverse, particularly if the patient is epileptic; after a little, the breathing may be deeper, the state one of less composure. Pointing with the hands to the pit of the stomach, laying the hands upon the shoulders, and slowly moving them on the arms down to the hands, the whole with the utmost quietude ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... have attracted the attention of medical men, and that literature should be replete with such instances. Pechlin and Muas record instances of painless births. The Ephemerides records a birth as having occurred during asphyxia, and also one during an epileptic attack. Storok also speaks of birth during unconsciousness in an epileptic attack; and Haen and others describe cases occurring during the coma attending apoplectic attacks. King reports the histories of two married ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... 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 as—as ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... 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 the previously formed spermatozoa. And the statements ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... 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 temporary ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... which time he was responsive and interested, constantly correcting statements of his father and volunteering other information. Eleven days after the operation he was reported to have had no more epileptic seizures. "Doesn't talk in sleep. Doesn't snore. Doesn't toss about the bed. Has more self-control. Tries to read the paper. His immoderate ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... their efforts; they are purple in the face and glistening with perspiration. Defeat, they know, is before them, for the orchestra has the greater staying power! The flutes bleat; the trombones grunt; the fiddles squeal; an epileptic leader cuts wildly into the air about him. When, finally, their strength exhausted, the breathless human beings, with one last ear-piercing note, give up the struggle and retire, the public, excited by the unequal contest, bursts into thunders ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... great triumph of "morals and medicine." The passion of avarice resembles the thirst of dropsical patients; that of envy is a slow wasting fever; love is often frenzy, and capricious and sudden restlessness, epileptic fits. There are moral disorders which at times spread like epidemical maladies through towns, and countries, and even nations. There are hereditary vices and infirmities transmitted from the parent's mind, as there are unquestionably ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... Buchan, the artist, had another epileptic fit, which was unfortunately fatal, and he was buried at sea in order to run no risk of offending against any of the customs or superstitions of the natives. Cook, in referring to his death, says: "He will be greatly missed in the course of ...
— The Life of Captain James Cook • Arthur Kitson
... man, had responded with a shout, the blacksmith, to whose deaf ears his anvil had been silent for twenty years, throwing up his hat with the rest, while the epileptic who manned the papier-mache gun was observed to scream ...
— Solomon Crow's Christmas Pockets and Other Tales • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... school is the renowned novel in which the hunchbacked lover watches the execution of his mistress from the tower of Notre-Dame; and its strength passes gradually away into the anatomical preparations, for the general market, of novels like "Poor Miss Finch," in which the heroine is blind, the hero epileptic, and the obnoxious brother is found dead with his hands dropped off, ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... time his epilepsy began is obscure, but this dreadful disease faithfully and frequently visited him during his whole adult life. From a curious hint that he once let fall, reenforced by the manner in which the poor epileptic in "The Karamazov Brothers" acquired the falling sickness, we cannot help thinking that its origin came from a blow given in ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... am sorry to say, had a good deal of trouble with some of our men here. One disappeared directly we arrived, and has never been seen since. Another came off suffering from delirium tremens and epileptic fits, brought on by drink. His cries and struggles were horrible to hear and witness. It took four strong men to hold him, and the doctor was up with him all last night. Nearly all the ships that come here have been at sea for ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... centuries—Monsieur Tissot has given us the basest masquerade that anyone has yet dared present as an illustration of the Scriptures. Look at that disreputable trull, a street slut tired of shouting "This way to the boats!" till she falls fainting. This is the Magnificat, the Blessed Virgin. That epileptic boy with outstretched arms is Jesus in the Temple. Look at the Baptism, the Pharisee and the Publican, the Massacre of the Innocents, the Saint Peter walking on the Sea, the Magdalen at the feet of Jesus, the ridiculous Consummatum est—look at them all: these prints are ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... deserved. Then, too, I can understand that, when breaking loose from long confinement, he ranges in all the exuberance of joy; and especially when he flushes almost his first covey, and the game falls dead before him, his mental powers are quite overcome, and he falls into an epileptic fit. ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... 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 ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead
... 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 ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the 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 than ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... states 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 free in the cavity ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... flowers grow and flourish. He lived in a villa with small grounds; he went off to his business in the morning, and returned in the afternoon to a high tea. In the evening he wrote and read aloud. The only thing that made him different from other men was that he had the fear of epileptic attacks for ever hanging over him; and further, he was unfitted for society owing to a very painful and violent stammer. I saw him twice in my life; remote impressions of people seen for a single evening are often highly inaccurate, but I will give them for what they are worth. On the ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... at any hour of the day those who would benefit from a few doses of medicine. But this did not satisfy the great majority, composed of old syphilitic cases, nor the leper, nor those suffering from elephantiasis, the epileptic, the scrofulous, or those who had been mutilated at the hands of the cruel Gallas. Day after day the crowd of patients increased; those who had met with refusal remained in the hope that on another ...
— A Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia - With Some Account of the Late Emperor Theodore, - His Country and People • Henry Blanc
... an epileptic fit," said Monsieur Bargemont, coughing; he was catching cold standing on ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... most vile and pernicious vice. The drunkard, deprived of the sense and reason given us by God, profanes the donations of the divinity: he debases himself to the condition of brutes; unable even to guide his steps, he staggers and falls as if he were epileptic; he hurts and even risks killing himself; his debility in this state exposes him to the ridicule and contempt of every person that sees him; he makes in his drunkenness, prejudicial and ruinous bargains, and injures his fortune; ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... last, meant as preservatives against unseen malarias or contagions, possible or impossible. He assists every month with his children at the mysteries of the Orphic priests; and finally, whenever he sees an epileptic patient, he spits in his own bosom to ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... in the world's history have been effected by dwellers in the borderlands. Mahomet was an epileptic, and his first vision was the result on an epileptic convulsion or seizure. The character of his visions was exactly like that of those visions which an epileptic sees and describes at the present time. Mahomet believed in his visions, and, what is more, got more than half the world to believe ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... The fathers were drunkards, but their immediate ancestors were free: four children died of general weakness, three of convulsions in the first month, two were feeble-minded, one was a dwarf, one was an epileptic, seven were normal. In a family in which both father and mother and their ancestors were drunkards there were six children: three died of convulsions within six months, one was an idiot, one a dwarf, and one an epileptic. For comparison there were taken from the same station ...
— Disease and Its Causes • William Thomas Councilman
... my shadow, and cursed profoundly, while his passion was mastering him. I noted with interest in that uncomfortable moment the clear signs of his epileptic tendencies, the twitching of the thumb that grasped the stick, the rigidity of the body, the curious working of certain facial muscles. I stood perfectly still, though my right hand involuntarily sought ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... tomb of his friend, whom he believed to be dead,[3] might be taken by those present for the agitation and trembling[4] which accompanied miracles. Popular opinion required that the divine virtue should manifest itself in man as an epileptic and convulsive principle. Jesus (if we follow the above hypothesis) desired to see once more him whom he had loved; and, the stone being removed, Lazarus came forth in his bandages, his head covered with a winding-sheet. This reappearance ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... triple time. Do you hear the sadness of the ambitious man who is not satisfied with love? Then, through his lamentation, by a transition to the key of E flat, allegro, common time, we hear the cries of the epileptic lover, his fury and certain warlike phrases, for the mighty charms of the one and only woman give him the impulse to multiplied loves which strikes us in Don Giovanni. Now, as you hear these themes, do you not catch ...
— Gambara • Honore de Balzac
... in the society of his male friends, was capricious. His temper was often sullen, and when in one of his gloomy moods he would spend the whole evening in his farm kitchen in morose silence. This state of mind was in part due to physical infirmity. As a child he had been subject to epileptic fits, and though these grew less frequent as he advanced to manhood, he never entirely shook them off, and during his married life a long spell of gloomy misanthropy would sometimes end in the return of one of these attacks. He was, too, a proud ...
— More Tales of the Ridings • Frederic Moorman
... can flash sometimes! Never mind my being drunk at this moment and having had a whole glass of wine. I am speaking the truth. I assure you that this glance has haunted my dreams; the very rustle of her dress was more than I could stand at last. I really began to think that I might become epileptic. I could never have believed that I could be moved to such a frenzy. It was essential, indeed, to be reconciled, but by then it was impossible. And imagine what I did then! To what a pitch of stupidity a man can be brought ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... vertigo, often produced by changing from a horizontal to a vertical position, seasickness, pain in movement in cases of meningitis, epileptic attacks at night, etc., may be by this explained. These views of Luys are accepted as true, but to a less extent than taught by Luys. The prevalent idea that a lesion of one hemisphere produces a paralysis upon ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 520, December 19, 1885 • Various
... 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 art, too, used by ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... Minnesota, recent bills presented to the Legislature "relating to and regulating marriage" include among the items "prohibition of marriage within six months after a divorce has been granted from a former spouse; and forbidding of marriage between persons either one of whom is epileptic, imbecile, feeble-minded, insane, an habitual drunkard, affected with a venereal disease, or addicted to the use of opium, morphine, or cocaine." This indicates the trend of newer laws regulating marriage. Is this trend justified? If so, how do the laws of your ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... between Apoplexy and Epilepsy.—1. Apoplexy mostly happens in people over thirty, whereas epilepsy generally occurs under that ago; at any rate for the first time. A person who has epileptic fits over thirty, has generally suffered from them for some years. 2. Again, in apoplexy, the body is paralyzed; and, therefore, has not the convulsions which take place in epilepsy. 3. The peculiar snoring will also distinguish ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... a story of an "amiable and intelligent" grimalkin, which belonged to a young girl who was subject to epileptic fits. Puss, by dint of repeated observation, knew when they were coming on, and would run, frisking her tail, to the girl's parents, mewing in the most heart-breaking tones, and clawing at their legs, till she made them follow her. Her name was Mina; and her history is extant ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 401, November 28, 1829 • Various
... Graham heard, from a worthy clergyman at Greenock, who, at her request, paid attention to her son, that he had been very ill of a fever, and subsequently subject to epileptic fits. In one of these he had fallen from the mast-head, and was rendered unfit for service for many months. The gentleman to whom he was apprenticed, permitted him to leave. In these circumstances Mrs. Graham addressed to him ...
— The Power of Faith - Exemplified In The Life And Writings Of The Late Mrs. Isabella Graham. • Isabella Graham
... the women's workroom. One of the sewing gang is epileptic, and fell in a fit a few minutes ago, so I sent for her. Come this way ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... a pair of overshoes; that he then poured a mixture of hearth paint, tomato catsup, liquid bluing, burnt cork, English mustard, Easter dyes and the yolks of a dozen eggs over himself, seasoning to taste with red peppers. Then he spread a large tarpaulin on the floor and lay down on it and had an epileptic fit, the result being a picture which he labeled Revolt, or Collision Between Two Heavenly Bodies, or Premature Explosion of a Custard Pie, or something else equally appropriate. The Futurists ought to make quite a number of converts in this country, especially among those advanced lovers ...
— Cobb's Bill-of-Fare • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... expression I got from an old colored man who used to work for my father years ago. Queer how such things stick to one, isn't it? But I don't just know how to describe what Burton told me about his daughter in any other way. She wasn't an epileptic. That's a thing one goes down under; and her case was just the reverse. She was, as a rule, propped up in a chair, as weak as a kitten; but when these things took her, she grew immensely strong and sort ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Criminologist • John T. McIntyre
... gold-beater from Fuerth had created so much excitement that the police had to be called in. A cooper's widow, who had managed to pay her premiums for one year, but had been unable to continue the payment for the quite sufficient reason that she had been in the hospital, fell headlong to the floor in epileptic convulsions when she heard ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... 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
... day before Christmas, 1909, that heavy bereavement once more came into the life of Mark Twain. His daughter Jean, long subject to epileptic attacks, was seized with a convulsion while in her bath and died before assistance reached her. He was dazed by the suddenness of the blow. His philosophy sustained him. He was glad, deeply glad for the beautiful girl that had ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... perceive the Palatine Hill rising steeply above you, with its summit crowned by the lofty palaces and gardens constructed by the Caesars. At the side and corner which look down upon the Forum stands the part built by Caligula, the epileptic who thought himself no less than a god, and who in consequence not only turned the temple of Castor into a lower vestibule to his own house, but also built a bridge across the valley over the temple of Augustus and the Basilica of Julius to the Capitoline Hill, so that he might visit and converse ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... covered them, turned away gasping. It couldn't be watched. An epileptic in a seizure can break the bones in a leg or arm by simultaneous contraction of opposing muscles. When all the opposed muscles of Hengly's body did this the results were ...
— The K-Factor • Harry Harrison (AKA Henry Maxwell Dempsey)
... say, en passant, that the miracles were frequently performed in their favor. Whenever the monks made some solemn procession, promenading through the streets the relics of some saint, it was not uncommon to see a franc-mitou, paralyzed, crippled or epileptic, endeavoring to touch the sacred casket; in vain would the attempt be made to keep him at a distance; he redoubled his efforts, and scarcely had he succeeded in gluing his lips to the sacred coffer when immediately the cripple threw away his crutch, the epileptic ceased to foam at the mouth, ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... furiously 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
... on to himself, "is but three and twenty. He is a better man than Lord Wellington with the gout, than the paralyzed Regent, than the epileptic royal family of Austria, than ...
— Massimilla Doni • Honore de Balzac
... had been healthy until twenty-one, and then had suffered from ovaritis, so that, although engaging in the work of a healthy woman, she should really be classed apart. One was subject to epileptic convulsions, and may therefore be fairly ruled out for the same reason. The remaining three were in good, even robust, general health. In two, pain was experienced for two days, and a certain diminution of capacity for mental exertion, which, however, had never ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... died. He found her crumpled up in the huddle of her skirts as if she had dropped in her tracks, which she had, in one of the epileptic heart strictures. ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... instant of numbing silence fell. A swish! A cat on a small bear's back. A scene impossible! A hairy tornado, rolling, twisting, flopping, yelling, screeching, roaring, and howling, tore, bit, scratched, clawed, and walloped all over the place. An epileptic nebula; a maelstrom that revolved in every way known to man at the same instant; a prodigy of tooth and claw. If that fight were magnified a hundred times, a glimpse of it would kill; as it was, myself and the clothing store boy clung weakly to the ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips
... 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 from a reclining posture, ...
— DISTURBANCES OF THE HEART • OLIVER T. OSBORNE, A.M., M.D.
... years of 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 ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... to the subject, endeavors to establish the existence, on the basis of degeneracy, of acute psychotic processes which do not belong to either the manic-depressive, hysterical, or epileptic temperaments, which cannot be placed under any of the known forms of dementia praecox, and which develop as wholly independent psychotic manifestations in particularly predisposed individuals. The material ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... edition, 1891), is devoted to proof and illustration of the proposition that genius is 'a special morbid condition'. He deals briefly with the case of Muhammad at pages 31, 39, and 325, maintaining that the prophet, like Saint Paul, Julius Caesar, and many other men of genius, was subject to epileptic fits. The Professor's book seems to be exactly what Sir W. H. Sleeman ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... and in such a case the traveller was never seen again alive. Tales of Robin Hood began to take shape. The by-ways and thickets were peopled with men, innocent or guilty, but all alike desperate. One Richard, we read, whose fellow at the plough fell dead in an epileptic fit, fled in terror of the judges to the woods, and so did many a worse man than Richard. We find constantly the same tale of the sudden quarrel, the blow with a stick or a stone, the thrust with the knife which every man carried, the stroke with a hatchet. Then the slayer in his panic flies ...
— Henry the Second • Mrs. J. R. Green
... F——, AEt. 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, and now there was evidently ...
— An Account of the Foxglove and some of its Medical Uses - With Practical Remarks on Dropsy and Other Diseases • William Withering
... Abimelech Johns was a tin-miner who had spent his days in profane swearing and coursing after hares with greyhounds until the Lord had thrown him into a trance like that which overtook Saul of Tarsus, and not unlike an epileptic fit Abimelech himself had had in childhood. Since the trance he was a changed man; his passion for souls was now as great as his passion for pleasure had been before, and he had a name for working himself and his congregations up to a higher pitch than any one who had been ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... saints separated, 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 ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... the sees of Alexandria and Antioch. After this he died in 491, and the last fact recorded of him is that the empress Ariadne, the daughter of Leo I., who had brought him the empire with her hand, when he fell into an epileptic fit and was supposed to be dead, had him buried at once, and placed guards around his tomb, who were forbidden to allow any approach to it. When the imperial vault was afterwards entered, Zeno was ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... intellect, and his peculiarities became more and more marked as the Abbe Faujas gradually came to dominate the household and induce Madame Mouret to neglect her husband and family for the service of the Church. By degrees Mouret came to be regarded as insane, and his wife having had several epileptic attacks, he was accused of having caused the injuries she had really inflicted on herself. His wrongful removal to the asylum at Les Tulettes followed, and confinement soon confirmed the insanity which before had only threatened. ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... fresh air, induces debility from defect of stimulus, and a consequent accumulation of sensorial power, and a general debility of the system. Whence arise the pains of cold and hunger, and those which are called nervous; and which are the cause of hysteric, epileptic, and perhaps of asthmatic paroxysms, and of the cold fits ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... was poor. He was epileptic, his strength undermined by incessant debauches; yet let a nation fancying him months away put on insurgent airs, and on that nation he descended as the thunder does. In his campaigns time and again he overtook his own messengers. A phantom in a ballad ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... frequently drawn from the sitters as well as from the medium, and the eventual effect on the latter is invariably evil, as is evinced by the large number of such sensitives who have gone either morally or psychically to the bad—some becoming epileptic, some taking to drink, others falling under influences which induced them to stoop to fraud and ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... about a dozen yards from my house," answered Dr. Mirandolet, in a sharp, staccato voice. "A policeman was bending over him. Mr. Gardiner hurriedly told us what he had seen. My first thought was that the man was in what is commonly termed a fit—some form of epileptic seizure, you know. I hastily examined him—and found that my ...
— The Orange-Yellow Diamond • J. S. Fletcher
... should no longer be excepted in the laws against 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 ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... . . Why, she goes into epileptic fits! The editor told me the papers are calling attention ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... chest, and head. There were yawning fissures that laid open the entire flank, the knotted viscera were drawn into great hard lumps beneath the tight-drawn skin, while as the effect of certain wounds the patient frothed at the mouth and writhed like an epileptic. Here and there were cases where the lungs had been penetrated, the puncture now so minute as to permit no escape of blood, again a wide, deep orifice through which the red tide of life escaped in torrents; and the ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... the ladder by tying it to the roots of a tree which grew midway up the rock. Here they found a footing for the whole party, which was, of course, small in number. In scaling the second precipice, however, one of the party was seized with an epileptic fit, to which he was subject, brought on, perhaps, by terror in the act of climbing the ladder. He could neither ascend nor descend; moreover, if they had thrown him down, apart from the cruelty of ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... the servants with a brutality which left me aghast. A wretched footman in his nervousness spilt some sauce over his sleeve. Lawson dashed the dish from his hand and volleyed abuse with a sort of epileptic fury. Also he, who had been the most abstemious of men, swallowed disgusting quantities ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... other allied variations are not always exactly repeated in inheritance. They may be transmuted in passing from father to son, an epileptic father, for instance, having a feeble-minded child. These relationships of feeble-mindedness have been clearly brought out in an important investigation by Davenport and Weeks (Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, November, 1911), who have for the first time succeeded in obtaining ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... put as to the probability of fits terminating in epilepsy; or, on the other hand, as to the ground for hope in any case that epileptic attacks, which have already often recurred, will eventually cease. In the first place, no conclusion can safely be drawn from the severity of a convulsion, nor from its general character, as to the probability of its frequent ...
— The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases • Charles West, M.D.
... not 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! Speak, father, and ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... "The fellow is an epileptic," said Smith-Oldwick. "I suppose many of them are. Their nervous condition is not without its good points—a normal man would have ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... discussion of it lately. A great deal of nonsense has been written on the connexion between religion and neuroticism. To quote Professor James' vigorous protest, "medical materialism finishes up St Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic. It snuffs out St Teresa as an hysteric, St Francis of Assisi as an hereditary degenerate. George Fox's discontent with the shams of his age, and his pining for spiritual veracity, it treats as a symptom of a disordered ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... mean time experiments were carried on in various hospitals of Paris. The epileptic patients at the Salpetriere were magnetised by permission of M. Esquirol. At the Bicetre also the same resuits were obtained. M. de Foissac busied himself with the invalids at the Hospice de la Charite, and M. Dupotet was equally successful in producing sleep or convulsions at ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... prominent part. This same principle is also seen in such reactions as the repetition of the question or the senseless repetition of a former answer. These phenomena remind us of what we see in epileptic confusions, in epileptic deterioration and ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... men to see Napoleon after his return from Waterloo was Lavallette. "I flew," says he, "to the Elysee to see the Emperor: he summoned me into his closet, and as soon as he saw me, he came to meet me with a frightful epileptic 'laugh. 'Oh, my God!' he said, raising his eyes to heaven, and walking two or three times up and down the room. This appearance of despair was however very short. He soon recovered his coolness, and asked me ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... can perhaps understand why mistletoe has so long and so persistently been prescribed as a cure for the falling sickness. As mistletoe cannot fall to the ground because it is rooted on the branch of a tree high above the earth, it seems to follow as a necessary consequence that an epileptic patient cannot possibly fall down in a fit so long as he carries a piece of mistletoe in his pocket or a decoction of mistletoe in his stomach. Such a train of reasoning would probably be regarded even now as cogent by a large portion of ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... his oars and stopped rowing. He panted, he gnashed his teeth, he frothed at the mouth, and when I thought he must be an epileptic, he lifted himself up with one strong shudder, and turning on me a face ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... everlasting joy. How long, O poor and exhausted workingmen of the world, will the shameful comedy continue? When will you finally perceive that not from a false and unexisting God, not from a mystical and epileptic crucified man, who died without rebellion and without protest, will come your redemption? When will you open your eyes to the truth of Socialism, and realize that finally upon you ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... 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
... disestablished and every archbishop and bishop deported to the 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
... affected, but from the influence of some severe mental shock received by the mother during her pregnancy. This subject of maternal impressions will come up for separate consideration in the discussion of pregnancy. Again, a child may be epileptic, although there is no epilepsy in the family, simply because of the intoxication of the father or mother at the time of the intercourse resulting in conception. Such cases are not due to hereditary transmission, for that cannot be hereditary which ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... me: "She will probably be remembered by numbers of persons in both the Federal and Confederate armies. These will tell you that I describe her accurately, using her real name, and will recall the strange prediction which she made, and which I repeat. Was she an epileptic? I do not know. I have certainly never encountered ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... fool," he 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 ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... death by sin." Death of the body is the 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 cause of ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... epileptic tendencies—as McPherson himself admits—had taken his benefactor's death terribly to heart, and had brooded over it day and night. Is there any reason to doubt that in such an unbalanced nature, this ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... as the devil would naturally speak, under the various circumstances in which 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. At the end of the fourth act, as a guest ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... his dissipation could yet scarcely be called dissipation, so little did it wake up this lethargic, ailing, restless nature. Despite the furious passion which he had for horses, and the hysterical, one might almost say epileptic passions which he experienced for women, he remained characterless, chaotic, only half alive. His many journeys gave him only the negative pleasure of getting away from already known places, the negative wisdom of seeing through a variety of things, military and diplomatic distinctions and national ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... fierce, untamable 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, ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... 378). This sort of thing, not seldom tried, has very seldom been a success; and Revenants can hardly be said to be one of the lucky exceptions. Sophie Printemps is the history of a good girl, who, out of her goodness, deliberately marries an epileptic. It has little merit, except for a large episode or parenthesis of some forty or fifty pages (nearly a sixth of the book), telling the prowess of a peremptory but agreeable baron, who first foils a dishonest banker, and then defends ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... answer their accusers: 'What,' they may cry, 'are we to investigate? It is absurd to ask us to leave our special studies, and sit for many hours, through many years, probably in the dark, with an epileptic person, and a few hysterical believers. We are not conjurers or judges of conjuring.' Again, is a man like Professor Huxley, or Lord Kelvin, to run about the country, examining every cottage where there ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... cause of dependence, we 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 and burden future generations. The policy of segregating the hopelessly ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... the epileptic, the strange twitchings of those afflicted with chorea, the shakings of palsy, dreams, trances, and the numberless frightful phenomena produced by diseases of the nerves, were all seized upon as so many proofs that the bodies of men were filled ...
— The Ghosts - And Other Lectures • Robert G. Ingersoll
... rate tell your son. He is a man, now, and he has the right to know who is his father. I do not know, and I never did know, never, never! I cannot tell you, my boy." He seemed to be losing his senses, his voice grew shrill and he worked his arms about as if he had an epileptic attack. "Come!... Give me an answer.... She does not know.... I will make a bet that she does not know ... No ... she does not know, by Jove!... She used to go to bed with both of us! Ha! ha! ha!... ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... he, therefore, jilt Miss Boffkin—impulse of a baser mind? No! He started epileptic ...
— Departmental Ditties and Barrack Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling
... a series of features besides those already mentioned bear undoubted testimony to the abnormally increased muscle erotic. I have already elsewhere discussed them in detail[12] and will here merely name briefly the chief factors. The patient had an epileptic alcoholic grandfather on the mother's side, who was notorious when under the influence of alcohol for his cruelty and pleasure in whipping. She had, besides a strongly sadistic mother, two older brothers, of whom the elder was frightfully violent and brutal, often choking ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger
... a bad attack of epileptic fits for a moment, till it transpired that he had flumped down on a dead Boche in endeavouring to escape the searching glare of the flare. After the thing had burnt its giddy self out Tommy crawled crab-fashion over into the providential cutting in which I had taken shelter. He was wiping ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... most important question is as to those vicious habits in which there is no love to sin, but only a dread and recoiling from intolerable pain, as in the case of the miserable drunkard! I trust that these epileptic agonies are rather the punishments than the augumenters of his guilt. The annihilation of the wicked is a fearful thought, yet it would solve many difficulties both in natural religion and in Scripture. And Taylor in his Arminian dread of Calvinism is always too shy of this "grace ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... arrival at Cape Francois, Denmark was sold with others of the slaves to a planter who owned a considerable estate. On his next trip, however, Captain Vesey learned that the boy was to be returned to him as unsound and subject to epileptic fits. The laws of the place permitted the return of a slave in such a case, and while it has been thought that Denmark's fits may have been feigned in order that he might have some change of estate, there was quite enough proof in the matter to impress ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... developed, the attack commenced with epileptic convulsions. Those affected fell to the ground senseless, panting and laboring for breath. They foamed at the mouth, and suddenly springing up began their dance amid strange contortions. Yet the malady doubtless made its appearance ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... labour beyond his body's apparent power of sustaining it, was a matter of astonishment, for he was of a spare habit, and had a white and soft skin, and was subject to complaints in the head and to epileptic fits, which, as it is said, first attacked him at Corduba;[482] notwithstanding all this, he did not make his feeble health an excuse for indulgence, but he made military service the means of his cure, by unwearied journeying, frugal diet, and by constantly keeping ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... I was possessed of a Jinn, the common Eastern explanation of an epileptic fit long before the days of the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... use trying to shield anyone, Vaughn," rapped out Kennedy, scarcely taking time to listen. "An epileptic of the most dangerous criminal type has arranged this whole elaborate setting as a plot to get rid of the wife who brought him his fortune and now stands in the way of his unholy love of Mrs. Langhorne. He used you to get the poison with which you treated ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... been better for a plebeian strain, since there was in him a touch of the degenerate. His mother's father had published a humanitarian poem on cats. His great-uncle had written a peculiar novel. Young Alfred was nervous, delicate, slightly epileptic, and it is certain that he was given to dissipation, which so far had affected his health only by making him hysterical. He was an exceedingly handsome youth, with exquisite manners, "dreamy rather than dazzling eyes, dilated nostrils, and vermilion lips half opened." ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... the machine which slips and throws everything out of gear, no matter how big the dynamo? I tell you, a dipsomaniac is no more to be blamed for lack of will power or moral strength than is a kleptomaniac, or than an epileptic is to be blamed for having fits. It's a disease. I'm giving it to you straight what ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... hand had nourished and maintained me. There are likewise, in this mysterious state of life, paroxysms and intervals of disordered consciousness, which memory refuses to acknowledge or record; the epileptic's waking dream is one—an unreal reality. And similar to this was my impression of the late events. They lacked substantiality. Memory took no account of them, discarded them, and would connect the present ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... that in this matter the State 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 ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... whereabouts be known to the buyer, in case of any reclamation. When a slave is sold who is subject to epilepsy, stone, or any other invisible disorder, the buyer, if he be a physician or trainer, or if he be warned, shall have no redress; but in other cases within six months, or within twelve months in epileptic disorders, he may bring the matter before a jury of physicians to be agreed upon by both parties; and the seller who loses the suit, if he be an expert, shall pay twice the price; or if he be a private ...
— Laws • Plato
... door being hurriedly unbarred, the "case" is handed out by his terrified companions, who are only too glad to be rid of him. To all appearances he is in a true epileptic state. In the light of the lantern, held conveniently near by one of the gangsmen, who have by this time turned out in various stages of undress, his features are seen to be strongly convulsed. His ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... An epileptic dropped in a fit on the streets of Boston not long ago, and was taken to a hospital. Upon removing his coat there was found pinned to his waistcoat a slip of paper ...
— Good Stories from The Ladies Home Journal • Various |
