Subtitled 'Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future', Beyond Good and Evil was Nietzsche's attempt to restate in plain argumentative prose, divided into 296 numbered sections and a closing poem, the ideas that Thus Spoke Zarathustra had put in prophetic form. The preface opens by supposing that truth is a woman and that dogmatic philosophers, with their clumsy seriousness, have never known how to win her.
Medical tag
Epilepsy Seizures
Epilepsy, 'falling sickness', fits and convulsions.
Works
Maudsley's Body and Mind argues that mental life cannot be separated from bodily organization, nervous function, heredity, and disease. Based on the Gulstonian Lectures, the book brings Victorian psychiatry, physiology, and evolutionary thought into one frame.
The Chronographia of Michael Psellos is a history of the Byzantine court across roughly a century, from the accession of Basil II in 976 to the reign of Michael VII Doukas in the 1070s. It is arranged by reign rather than by year and covers fourteen emperors and empresses.
De Materia Medica is an ancient pharmacopoeia: a systematic guide to plants, animals, minerals, wines, oils and manufactured preparations used as medicines. Dioscorides does not write a narrative.
Hippocratic Writings is not a single book but a library of early Greek medicine: case histories, ethical rules, theoretical essays, surgical manuals, dietetic advice, aphorisms and polemics against rival healers. Its strongest works begin from the sickbed.
This volume completes the library's surviving plays of Euripides with eleven works in Edward P. Coleridge's prose translation of 1891. Iphigenia in Aulis, produced after the poet's death in 405 BC, opens at night on the shore of Aulis, where the Greek fleet is held back by windless weather.
Julius Caesar, Shakespeare's tragedy of the assassination of 44 BC, begins as Rome celebrates Caesar's triumph over the sons of Pompey. The tribunes rebuke the fickle crowd, a soothsayer warns Caesar to beware the Ides of March, and Caesar is offered a crown three times by Mark Antony and refuses it, then falls in a fit of the falling sickness.
The Laws is Plato's last and longest dialogue, twelve books of conversation in which three elderly men design the constitution and legal code of a new city. On a midsummer day an unnamed Athenian Stranger walks from Knossos toward the cave and shrine of Zeus with Cleinias, a Cretan, and Megillus, a Spartan.
Kraepelin's Lectures on Clinical Psychiatry introduces readers to psychiatric diagnosis through bedside cases and disease course. Rather than beginning with abstract definitions, the lectures proceed from patients: mood disturbance, excitement, confusion, delusions, hallucinations, deterioration, alcoholism, epilepsy, paralysis, dementia praecox, manic-depressive insanity, and other clinical groupings.
Charcot's lectures show clinical neurology becoming a public method: observe signs, localize lesions, correlate symptoms with anatomy, and teach by cases. The English volumes gather Salpetriere lectures on spinal cord disease, paralysis, tremor, sclerosis, locomotor ataxia, hysteria, epilepsy, and related nervous disorders.
Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil was published in London in 1651, two years after the execution of Charles I, and its famous frontispiece shows a giant crowned sovereign whose body is made of hundreds of tiny subjects, holding a sword and a bishop's crozier above a peaceful town. The Introduction states the governing analogy: as art can make automata with springs for hearts and strings for nerves, so human art creates the commonwealth, an artificial man whose soul is sovereignty.
Lord of the Flies follows a party of British schoolboys, aged roughly six to twelve, whose aeroplane is shot down over a tropical island during an unnamed atomic war. No adult survives.
Esquirol expands Pinelian alienism into a more elaborate clinical and institutional system. Mental Maladies surveys insanity as a family of disorders marked by disturbances of perception, judgment, passion, volition, and bodily function.
Oliver Twist, subtitled The Parish Boy's Progress, follows an orphan from a workhouse cradle to a safe home, passing on the way through the criminal underworld of 1830s London. Oliver is born in a workhouse in an unnamed town; his mother dies within minutes, leaving only a locket and a ring that later prove who she was.
Othello is the tragedy of a Moorish general in the service of Venice who is brought, step by step, to murder the wife who loves him. The play opens at night in a Venetian street, where the ensign Iago, furious that Othello has promoted the Florentine Michael Cassio over him, rouses the senator Brabantio with crude news that his daughter Desdemona has eloped with the Moor.
Paradise Lost is John Milton's epic in twelve books of blank verse on the fall of man, written, as the opening invocation says, to assert Eternal Providence and justify the ways of God to men. It begins in the middle of things.
Silas Marner is George Eliot's short novel of a lonely linen-weaver restored to human fellowship by a child. In his youth Silas belonged to a strict dissenting congregation at Lantern Yard in a northern manufacturing town, where he was respected for his piety and for the cataleptic fits the brethren took for spiritual visitations.
St. Thomas Becket and the Canterbury Miracles traces a murder into a medical archive. Becket's political story is familiar: the brilliant royal chancellor becomes archbishop of Canterbury, clashes with Henry II over ecclesiastical liberty and royal jurisdiction, goes into exile, returns under tense compromise, and is killed in the cathedral on 29 December 1170 by knights acting in the atmosphere of the king's fury.
St. Vitus and the Dancing Mania joins two histories that later language often confuses: the hagiographic cult of a youthful martyr and the medical naming of involuntary or epidemic movement. The saint layer is late antique and medieval.
The Bible is the sacred scripture of Judaism and Christianity, and the reference edition presents the King James Version of 1611, the most influential translation in English. It is a library rather than a single book.
The Brothers Karamazov centers on the murder of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, a sensual, neglectful father whose sons embody conflicting responses to desire, faith, reason, and guilt. Dmitri is passionate, impulsive, indebted, and publicly at war with his father over inheritance and Grushenka.
The Count of Monte Cristo is a vast novel of injustice and revenge. In 1815 Edmond Dantès, a young sailor of Marseilles, returns from a voyage on which he carried a letter from Napoleon's island of Elba as a dying captain requested.
The Fall of the Roman Republic is a selection of six of Plutarch's Roman Lives, arranged to tell the story of the Republic's collapse in the century before Augustus: Marius, Sulla, Crassus, Pompey, Caesar and Cicero. Read in sequence, they show how military glory, personal ambition and civil war destroyed Rome's traditional government.
This entry gathers the Golden Legend chapters and adjacent medieval traditions behind saints whose images still move through calendars, holidays, icons, hospitals, medals, advertising, and folklore. Jacobus de Voragine did not write critical biography in the modern sense.
The Histories is the first great work of prose history in the Western tradition, an inquiry (historia) into the causes and course of the wars between the Greeks and the Persian Empire. Herodotus states his purpose in the opening: to preserve the memory of great and marvellous deeds of Greeks and barbarians, and especially the reason why they fought one another.
Tom Jones tells the story of a foundling raised by a good country gentleman, his expulsion from home, his adventures on the road and in London, and his final restoration and marriage. The eighteen books are each opened by an essay in which the narrator talks with the reader about the art of writing, critics, love, or human nature.
The Idiot tells what happens when a man of complete goodness and simplicity enters the money-driven society of St. Petersburg in the late 1860s. Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, the last of an old noble family, returns to Russia after four years in a Swiss sanatorium, where Dr. Schneider treated him for the epileptic illness that left him so slow as a child that people called him an idiot.
The Murder on the Links is Agatha Christie's second Hercule Poirot novel, narrated like the first by Captain Arthur Hastings. Returning from Paris on the Calais boat-train, Hastings meets a pert young actress with black curls who calls herself Cinderella.
The Principles of Psychology is a two-volume, 1,400-page textbook that William James spent twelve years writing for Henry Holt's American Science Series. It sets out to treat psychology as a natural science of mental life, studying feelings, desires, cognitions and decisions together with their bodily conditions, while refusing to reduce the mind to physiology or to dissolve it into atoms of sensation.
Ammianus Marcellinus wrote his history in thirty-one books, beginning with the accession of Nerva in AD 96, where Tacitus had stopped, and ending with the Gothic victory at Adrianople in 378. The first thirteen books are lost.
The trial records of Joan of Arc are not a saint's life in the ordinary devotional sense. They are hostile legal documents that accidentally preserve one of the most vivid medieval voices.
The Twelve Caesars offers biographies of Julius Caesar and the first eleven Roman emperors from Augustus through Domitian. Suetonius does not write history as Tacitus does, with sustained analysis of institutions and causation.
The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature collects the twenty Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion that William James delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 1901 and 1902. Instead of studying churches, creeds or theology, James studies personal religious experience as a psychologist, drawing on a large collection of first-person documents: diaries, autobiographies, letters and replies to questionnaires.
Washington: A Life is Ron Chernow's single-volume biography of George Washington, published in October 2010 and awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 2011. Chernow's central aim is to replace the remote, marble figure of patriotic legend with a man of strong passions, ambition and a fierce temper, held in check by a lifelong discipline of self-command.
Passages
- Beyond Good and Evil, Part Three, §47
The 'religious neurosis' linked to solitude, fasting and sexual abstinence, with speculation about disguised epilepsy and mention of alienists studying the Salvation Army.
- Chronographia, Reign of Michael IV
The emperor's seizures, the efforts to conceal them, and his final illness with dropsy.
- Hippocratic Writings, On the Sacred Disease 1–2
The writer rejects divine special status for epilepsy and argues that it has a natural cause like other diseases.
- Iphigenia in Aulis and Other Plays, Heracles, Iris and Madness scene and messenger speech
Madness is sent into Heracles; the messenger describes his eyes, foaming and delusions as he kills his sons and wife.
- Julius Caesar, Act 1, Scene 2
Casca reports that Caesar fell down in the market-place and foamed at the mouth; Brutus says he has the falling sickness. Caesar also tells Antony he is deaf in one ear.
- Laws, Book XI
The law that the mad must be kept at home by their relatives, the kinds of madness, the sale of a slave with epilepsy, and the law on poisoning and sorcery.
- Lectures on the Diseases of the Nervous System, Seizure and convulsion discussions
The comparison of hysterical attack, epilepsy, and other convulsive states shows nineteenth-century diagnostic sorting.
- Leviathan, Part II, Ch. XXIX
Diseases of the commonwealth compared to epilepsy, hydrophobia, ague, pleurisy, intestinal worms (ascarides) and bulimia.
- Leviathan, Part IV, Ch. XLV, 'Of Daemonology'
Critique of belief in demons and possession, reinterpreting biblical demoniacs as madmen and lunatics.
- Lord of the Flies, Chapter 1
Piggy explains his asthma and need for glasses; Simon faints during the choir's march across the hot sand.
- Lord of the Flies, Chapter 8
Simon's waking vision before the pig's head ends in a faint.
- Oliver Twist, Chapters XXXVIII and XLVI
Monks has a fit during a thunderstorm before the Bumbles; Nancy later describes his desperate fits and the marks of teeth on his lips and hands.
- Othello, Act 4, Scene 1
Othello falls into a trance or fit after Iago's broken words about Cassio; Iago calls it an epilepsy and tells Cassio the lethargy must have its quiet course.
- Paradise Lost, Book XI
Michael's vision of the lazar-house lists the diseases, madness and melancholy that will afflict Adam's descendants.
- Silas Marner, Chapter I
Silas's cataleptic trance at the dying deacon's bedside and the brethren's reading of his fits as visitations.
- St. Thomas Becket and the Canterbury Miracles, Benedict and William miracle collections
The collections record claims involving fever, blindness, paralysis, seizures, madness, leprosy, wounds, and accidents with unusually concrete social detail.
- St. Vitus and the Dancing Mania, Vitus cult notice
Vitus is invoked against epilepsy and becomes a Holy Helper, creating the devotional link between saint and convulsive illness.
- The Bible, Matthew 17:14–18; Mark 9:17–29
The boy described as 'lunatick' who falls into fire and water, foams and is rigid, often read as epilepsy.
- The Brothers Karamazov, The Karamazov household
The Brothers Karamazov gives this tag concrete force through its medical material includes epilepsy, hysteria, alcoholism, trauma, patricidal obsession, suicidal despair, and the contagious psychology of families
- The Count of Monte Cristo, Château d'If chapters ('The Abbé's Chamber' to 'The Cemetery of the Château d'If')
Faria's cataleptic attacks, treated with drops of a red liquid; the third attack kills him.
- The Fall of the Roman Republic: Six Lives, Life of Caesar 17
Caesar's epilepsy and his use of hard living on campaign as a remedy for his weak health.
- The Golden Legend: Popular Saints, Life of St. Valentine and later cult
Valentine was invoked against epilepsy in parts of medieval and early modern Europe, a strand separate from the later romance holiday.
- The Histories, Book 3.29–38
Cambyses' madness, his killing of the Apis bull, and Herodotus' suggestion that he had the 'sacred disease'.
- The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, Book II, Chapters viii-ix
Captain Blifil dies suddenly; two physicians called in after death dispute apoplexy versus epilepsy.
- The Idiot, Part II, Chapter V
The extended description of Myshkin's pre-seizure states, his reflection on whether a diseased state can yield a true insight, and the fit on the hotel staircase.
- The Idiot, Part IV, Chapter VII and Conclusion
The seizure at the Epanchins' party, and Myshkin's final loss of understanding and return to Dr. Schneider's care in Switzerland.
- The Murder on the Links, Chapters 14-15 and 19
The examining doctor finds that the man in the shed was already dead when stabbed; Poirot's reconstruction attributes his death to an epileptic fit.
- The Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, Chapter IX: The Stream of Thought
Interruptions of consciousness under nitrous oxide and other anaesthetics, in epilepsy and fainting, and how the edges of experience merge across the gap.
- The Roman History, Book XXX, ch. 6
Valentinian, enraged at the Quadic envoys, loses his voice, is seized by convulsions and dies at Brigetio.
- The Trial of Joan of Arc, Condemnation trial, first voice testimony
Joan describes onset, fear, time of day, location, light, and auditory experience, giving material often cited in medical speculation.
- The Twelve Caesars, Julius Caesar
Reports of Caesar's falling sickness and bodily habits show illness incorporated into political biography.
- The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lecture I: Religion and Neurology
Critique of medical materialism; acknowledgement that religious leaders often show nervous instability, and the argument that origin does not determine value.
- The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lectures XVI and XVII: Mysticism
The four marks of mystical states; alcohol as the exciter of the 'Yes function'; nitrous oxide and ether revelations; epileptic auras and the darker 'diabolical mysticism' of insanity.
- Washington: A Life, The planter years (1773)
Patsy Custis's epilepsy and death in a seizure at Mount Vernon.
Quotes
“Wherever the religious neurosis has appeared on the earth so far, we find it connected with three dangerous prescriptions as to regimen: solitude, fasting, and sexual abstinence”
“he was no longer himself; his eyes were rolling; he was quite distraught; his eyeballs were bloodshot”
“And this is a Disease which not unfitly may be compared to the Epilepsie, or Falling-sicknesse (which the Jewes took to be one kind of possession by Spirits) in the Body Naturall”
“St. Vitus is appealed to, above all, against epilepsy, which is called St. Vitus's Dance, and he is one of the Fourteen Martyrs who give aid in times of trouble”
“Dr Y. holding that he died of an apoplexy, and Dr Z. of an epilepsy.”
“Medical materialism finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic”
“That shape am I_, I felt, potentially”