The Falling Sickness: A History of Epilepsy from the Greeks to the Beginnings of Modern Neurology

by Owsei Temkin

Book Overview

Owsei Temkin presents the history of epilepsy in Western civilization from ancient times to the beginnings of modern neurology. First published in 1945 and thoroughly revised in 1971, this classic work by one of the history of medicine's most eminent scholars now returns to print in a new softcover edition.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0801812119
• ISBN13: 9780801812118
• Release Date: October 1971
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Length: 467 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

A necessary account, a necessity for action

I've had epilepsy now for over 45 years. It caused, despite high qualifications, loss of marriage, career and home. It isn't the duty of a medical researcher to effect social change. He provides fact, not superstition. It's for the activist to do just this: agitate, endlessly, for change. Use this work as source material for the cause, not as a substitute for action of your own. Ask: why is this subject so rarely mentioned? Is it shameful, embarrassing? Why should it, any more than migraine? There's only one response: agitate,day by day. I did, and do, just that here in the UK. I had a deliberately ambiguous badge made, and wear it still in the open: Fit for Life with Epilepsy. This is 'in your face' agitation. It's necessary. How else do you counteract millennia of stupidity and prejudice? Only one person, signicantly, has complained about the badge: the representative of a major epilepsy charity! The complaint was rejected, three times. I still wear the badge. I'm part of society, reject us as it will, and I want society to see so. I'm here, whether they like it or not.

A Timid Author With a Powerful Story

From the viewpoint of the disability activist, the only major work on the history of epilepsy should be a civil rights book about the mistreatment of a minority group since ancient times. Dr Temkin will only admit that people with epilepsy have always been "objects of horror and disgust". Beyond that point his book is 2500 years of intellectual history, too much of it elaborate details of long discredited theories. Yet the author's research is so outstanding and his bibliography of 1120 books and articles so complete that anything less than a 5 star rating would be improper. Dr Temkin deserves special credit for uncovering Richard Caton's 1875 article "The Electric Discharges of the Brain". In 2001 the Medieval Madness Syndrome continues of people with epilepsy being rejected by family, friends, and employers because they have a "deliberately chosen illness". Our timid author declines to ask how this could be true 126 years after the actual cause of epilepsy was discovered. But his research demands an answer to that question.