"Epileptic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... doubt his admiration for the opera. It was expressed in a manner peculiar to Jernington that became almost epileptic, but it ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... mathematics being considered his weakness. As his only chance of health lay in complete rest during the holiday, this plan of spending the summer in study was simply a death sentence. In July, while at work on logarithm tables, he was overtaken by a sudden fainting fit, evidently of an epileptic nature. The malady gained strength, aided by the weakness of his heart and lungs, and he died on ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... the very outset, appear made to be healthy and 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 nurses; ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... but too common in childhood, and as to which a few words apart are needed. Usually a child epileptic for some years will carry the disease with it for a time, the length of which no man can set. The disease may be such as to ruin mind and body, or the attacks may be rare, and not prevent courageous and resolute natures from leading useful lives. All intermediate degrees are possible. ...
— Doctor and Patient • S. Weir Mitchell
... conditions, manic-depressive insanity, general paresis, and epileptic dementia the test reveals some characteristic, ...
— A Study of Association in Insanity • Grace Helen Kent
... 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 ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... 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 name of boy. They could not pass it by, nor, having entered, ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... symptoms precede an epileptic fit. The animal suddenly staggers; the muscles become cramped; the jaws may be spasmodically opened and closed, and the tongue become lacerated between the teeth; the animal foams at the mouth and falls in a spasm. The urine flows involuntarily, and the breathing may be temporarily ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... assistance." Pliny, in his Natural History, B. 38, c. 4, says: "Despuimus comitiales morbos, hoc est, contagia regerimus," "We spit out the epilepsy, that is, we avert the contagion." This is said, probably, in reference to a belief, that on seeing an epileptic person, if we spit, we shall avoid the contagion; but it by no means follows that the person so doing must spit upon the epileptic person. We read in the first Book of Samuel, ch. xxi., ver. 12: ...
— The Captiva and The Mostellaria • Plautus
... impetuous Gas above my head Begins irascibly to flare and fret, Wheezing into its epileptic jet, Reminding me I ought to ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 - Edited by Sir Edward Howard Marsh • Various
... "medicine-man" (here, doctor) begins his candidacy in his eighth or tenth year. Of the "wizards," or "doctors" of the Patagonians, Falkner says, that they "are selected in youth for supposed qualifications, especially if epileptic" (406. 456). While among the Dieyerie of South Australia, the "doctor" is not allowed to practise before having been circumcised, or to enter upon the duties of his office before completing his ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... really?—Oh, now I understand! Now I begin to see what a hideous creature you are! You have been here before and stabbed him to death! It was you who had been sitting there on the sofa; it was you who made him think himself an epileptic—that he had to live in celibacy; that he ought to rise in rebellion against his wife; yes, it was you!—How ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... of laughter, but slowly Margot Poins fell across the Queen's knees. She uttered no sound, but lay there motionless. The sight affected Udal to an epileptic fury. ...
— The Fifth Queen Crowned • Ford Madox Ford
... deceased lying on the pavement, 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
... eyes, 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)
... two hundred and five pounds, and possesses only slight traces of intelligence. Teething spasms, occurring when they were about two years old, is the cause of their idiocy. Both are subject to frequent and violent spasms or epileptic fits. They need constant care and attention. Should Bertha's hand fall into the fire, she has not sufficient intelligence to withdraw it from the flames. Both are helpless as children. The State provides for insane, but not for idiots. Keseberg says a bill setting aside a ward in the State Asylum ...
— History of the Donner Party • C.F. McGlashan
... 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 and ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... skimmington ceased. The roars of sarcastic laughter went off in ripples, and the trampling died out like the rustle of a spent wind. Elizabeth was only indirectly conscious of this; she had rung the bell, and was bending over Lucetta, who remained convulsed on the carpet in the paroxysms of an epileptic seizure. She rang again and again, in vain; the probability being that the servants had all run out of the house to see more of the Daemonic Sabbath than they ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... was having 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 his ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... certain Abib, the writer's master in the science of medicine. It is written from Bethany; and the "strange medical experience" of which it treats, is the case of Lazarus, whom Karshish has seen there. Lazarus, as he relates, has been the subject of a prolonged epileptic trance, and his reason impaired by a too sudden awakening from it. He labours under the fixed idea that he was raised from the dead; and that the Nazarene physician at whose command he rose (and who has since perished in a popular tumult) was no other ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... wells. He taught his son crystal gazing and the use of the "peepstone" to discover hidden treasure. Young Joseph was good-natured and lazy. Early in life he began to have visions which were accompanied by epileptic "seizures." One night in 1823, according to his story, the angel Moroni appeared to him three times, and told him that the Bible of the western continent, the supplement to the New Testament, was buried on a hill called Cumorah, now commonly ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous
... 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 these crazy attempts, ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... there is no evidence that it was repeated. Bulwer-Lytton considered Swinburne's opinions preposterous, and indeed if he told Swinburne, as in 1869 he told his son Robert, that Victor Hugo was "but an epileptic dwarf in a state of galvanism," there must have been wigs on the green ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... Then I 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 ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... predisposition to disease is a congenital, not an acquired character, and as such would be the subject of inheritance. The often-quoted case of a disease induced by mutilation being inherited (Brown-Sequard's epileptic guinea-pigs) has been discussed by Professor Weismann, and shown to be not conclusive. The mutilation itself—a section of certain nerves—was never inherited, but the resulting epilepsy, or a general ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... informed her mother that, God willing, she would never again look upon the King of England's face uncoffined. Isabeau found her a madwoman. The girl swept opposition before her with gusts of demoniacal fury, wept, shrieked, tore at her hair, and eventually fell into a sort of epileptic seizure; between rage and terror she became a horrid, frenzied beast. I do not dwell upon this, for it is not a condition in which the comeliest maid shows to advantage. But, for the Valois, insanity always lurked ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... 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, in ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... the Middle Ages, pp. 89-91. The same work supplies other points of analogy between this epidemic and that of St. Medard; for example: "Where the disease was completely developed, the attack commenced with epileptic convulsions."—p. 88. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... His manner, I own, may be 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 huge ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... consanguinity is not directly put to the applicants for a marriage license. The applicants are required to answer the usual questions in regard to age, parentage, residence, etc., and are then required to swear that their previous statements have been correct and that neither of them is "epileptic, imbecile or insane," that they are "not nearer of kin than second cousins, and not at the time under the influence of any intoxicating liquor or narcotic drug." Undoubtedly violations of the consanguinity clause are very ...
— Consanguineous Marriages in the American Population • George B. Louis Arner
... "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 ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... to lose the confidence of the good wife by parading too quickly my disbelief in the phantom her husband declared that he ad seen; but as the story itself seemed at once to decide the nature of the fit to be epileptic, I began to tell her of similar delusions which, in my experience, had occurred to those subjected to epilepsy, and finally soothed her into the conviction that the apparition was clearly reducible to natural causes. Afterwards, ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 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
... in charge of Prof. Westfahl, which was lately carried on by Dr. T. Galle (Uber die Beziehunger des Alcoholismus zur Epilepsie. Inaug. Dissert. 1881, Berlin), showed that among 607 patients who had entered the ward as epileptics or epileptic insane, 150 24.7 per cent. had been addicted to drink; 133 before, and 17 after the disease had shown itself; further, that of 1572 patients with delirium tremens, alcoholism, alcoholic dementia, and ebrietas, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 415, December 15, 1883 • Various
... attacks of 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 had no influence over him, and with the idea that there ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... all signs are therefore displayed by the urinary apparatus which is, so to say, the guardian of the genital apparatus. Most of the so-called bladder disturbances of this period are of a sexual nature; whenever the enuresis nocturna does not represent an epileptic attack it ...
— Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex • Sigmund Freud
... is 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
... my advice, bobbies," I heard the indignant Sergeant declaim outside the door, "and don't you believe things is always what they seem. A party ain't necessarily drunk because he rolls about and falls down in the street; he may be mad, or 'ungry, or epileptic, and a body ain't always a body jest because it's dead and cold and stiff. Why, men, as you've seen, it may be a mummy, which is quite a different thing. If I was to put on that blue coat of yours, would that make me a policeman? Good heavens! I should hope not, for ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... this law in the married state does not produce in the husband any very serious disorder. Debility, aches, cramps, and a tendency to epileptic seizures, are sometimes seen as the effects of great excess. An evil of no small account is the steady growth of the sexual passion by habitual unrestraint. It is in this way that what is known as libidinous blood is nursed as well among those who are strictly virtuous, in the ordinary meaning ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... 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 ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... louder, the more confused the Psychological physician became; and presently he got furious, burst out of the anti-spasmodic or round-about style and called Alfred a d—d ungrateful, insolent puppy, and went stamping about the room; and, finally, to the young man's horror, fell down in a fit of an epileptic character, grinding his teeth and ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... traditional old hag, hideous and malevolent; no pallid, raving epileptic to accuse herself in shrieking tales of Black Men, and Sabbats, and harm done to neighbors' cattle or crops. Her father was a clergyman who brought his goods and his motherless daughter from England to the Colonies, and settled in "ye Pequot Marsh country." There he found ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... 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 ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... 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
... midnight. The old people did not leave the table for fourteen hours. The grave-digger did the cooking, and did it very well. He was renowned for that, and he left his ovens to come and dance and sing between every two courses. And yet he was epileptic, was poor Pere Bontemps. Who would have suspected it? He was as fresh and vigorous and gay as a young man. One day we found him lying like a dead man in a ditch, all distorted by his malady, just at nightfall. We carried ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... entered Bethany. The painful emotion felt by Jesus at the grave of the friend whom he believed to be dead (John xi. 33, 38) might be taken by those present for the agitation and tremors which were wont to accompany miracles. According to popular belief, divine power in a man was like an epileptic and convulsive element. Continuing the above hypothesis, Jesus wished to see once more the man he had loved, and the stone having been rolled away, Lazarus came forth in his grave-clothes, his head bound with ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... 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 for ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... in their ordinary way. The highest form of emotional instability exists in confirmed epilepsy, where its manifestations have often been studied; it is found in a high but somewhat less extraordinary degree in the hysterical and allied affections. In the confirmed epileptic constitution the signs of general instability of nervous action are muscular convulsions, irregularities of bodily temperature, mobile intellectual activity, and extraordinary oscillations between opposed emotional states. I am assured by excellent authority ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... 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
... treatment. It is probable that we have returned to Alexander's treatment of epilepsy much more nearly than is generally thought. There are those who still think that remedies of various kinds do good, but in the large epileptic colonies regular exercise, bland diet, regulation of the bowels, and avoidance of excesses of all kinds, with occupation of mind, constitute ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... called it, and in the name of justice and humanity, demanded the immediate arrest of Cocoleu, that wretch whose unconscious statement formed the basis of the accusation. He demanded with a furious oath that the epileptic idiot should be sent to the hospital, and kept there so as to be professionally examined by experts. The mayor had for some time refused to grant the request, which seemed to him unreasonable; but he doctor had talked so loud and insisted so strongly, that at last he had ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau
... which they bear an affinity, this would be the 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 such diseases of the body: the ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... aptitude for book learning, and many of inferior mental qualities who do not profit by ordinary classroom procedure. Still more, they have brought into the school the crippled, tubercular, deaf, epileptic, and blind, as well as the sick, needy, and physically unfit. By steadily raising the age at which children may leave school, from ten or twelve up to fourteen and sixteen, schools everywhere have come to contain many children who, having no natural aptitude for study, would at once, unless specially ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... mount of transfiguration, a dumb, epileptic, and lunatic boy was brought by his father to those disciples ...
— Miracles of Our Lord • George MacDonald
... extended, neck and head pointing upward, while its back was curved like a saddle. I was afraid it might be hydrophobia or some other infectious sickness, and shot it on the spot. Perhaps I was rather too hasty; we can scarcely have any infection among us now. But what could it have been? Was it an epileptic attack? The other day one of the other puppies alarmed me by running round and round in the chart-house as if it were mad, hiding itself after a time between a chest and the wall. Some of the others, too, had seen it do the same thing; but after a while it got all right again, and for the ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... disease was completely 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 very variously, and was modified by ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... 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 women, fond mothers and anticipating the event, who gave birth to children, apparently ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... 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 expense of the Institution, ...
— A Narrative of Some of the Lord's Dealings with George Mueller - Written by Himself, Fourth Part • George Mueller
... among the cottagers and 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 ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... said I; "but are you aware, that in the midst of your delightful and entertaining conversation, you tumbled off your chair in an epileptic fit?—are ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... das Feld dunkler Vorstellungen das groesste in Menschen.' He has a chapter on 'The Divining Faculty' (pp. 89-93). He will not hear of presentiments, and, unlike Hegel, he scouts the Highland second-sight. The 'possessed' of anthropology are epileptic patients. Mystics ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... mamma!" And the sister, sinking down on the floor, striking the wood with her forehead fanatically, twisting herself about and quivering like a person in an epileptic fit, groaned: "Jesus, Jesus—mamma—Jesus!" ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... 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 ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... sake keep off!" Kelson shrieked, as the vibrating form of an epileptic imbecile, with protruding blue eyes and pimply cheeks, came up to him, and thrust its ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... the crowd—she met them all 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 ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... was that he was struck by a fit of epilepsy,— though anyone less like an epileptic subject it would be hard to find. In my bewilderment I looked round to see what could be the immediate cause. My eye fell upon the sheet of paper, I stared at it with considerable surprise. I had not noticed it there previously I had not put it there,—where ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... . . . Why, she goes into epileptic fits! The editor told me the papers are calling ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... garden, and stood beside the grave in the cold, looking fixedly at it, but making 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 awake again for ...
— Archibald Malmaison • Julian Hawthorne
... then, that in London the process of dissociation, after this period of gradual growth, suddenly leaped into activity. Thereafter his hallucinations, from being sporadic and vague, became habitual and definite, his hystero-epileptic attacks more frequent. But, happily for him, the dissociation never became complete. He was left in command of his original personality, his mental powers continued unabated; and he was still able to adjust himself to the environment ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... 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 ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... in the abdomen, 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 internal hemorrhages, those that ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... children have been sent to their proper institutions. One of them is deaf, one an epileptic, and the other three approaching idiocy. None of them ought ever to have been accepted here. This as an educational institution, and we can't waste our valuable plant ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... 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 ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... speaking. The judge had buried his face in his hands, as if he were thinking, but I could see he was shaking like an epileptic. ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... enlarged your superiority. The new war changed nothing but the color of maps, the design of postage stamps, and the relationship of a few accidentally conspicuous individuals. In one of the last of these international epileptic fits, for example, the English, with much dysentery and bad poetry, and a few hundred deaths in battle, conquered the South African Boers at a gross cost of about three thousand pounds per head—they ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... seems indeed a good appellation for the too simple-minded system of thought which we are considering. 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. It snuffs out Saint Teresa as an hysteric, Saint 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 colon. Carlyle's organ-tones of misery it accounts ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... 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 recurrence, or of its passing into permanent epilepsy. ...
— The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases • Charles West, M.D.
... 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 very ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... whose eloquence had charmed, whose benevolent 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 only with the bright experience she ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... 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
... finally the younger one fell forward on her face, in a sort of trance. After a time she got back upon her seat; but I never witnessed such a state of excitement, except once, years ago, when I saw a young woman in an epileptic fit. All this was evidently in a sort of small camp-meeting style. August is the month for these meetings when out of doors; but this was a minor one. The woman in front grinned, and even laughed outright, having great hollows or dimples in her cheeks. The young girl was ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter
... health sank more and more, and he became subject to violent eruptions on the face and to bad epileptic fits, and his spirits sank every day. At last, as he was praying before the shrine of St. Edward at Westminster Abbey, he was seized with a terrible fit, and was carried into the Abbot's chamber, where he presently died. It had been foretold that ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens
... him into this thing so as to be able to work him in the interests of the machine, eh?" inquired the Duke, putting into brutal speech even more than his grandson's vague suspicions suggested. "Now, look here! You remember Pod McClintock and his epileptic fits? You know he fell into a barbed-wire fence in a fit, and told around afterward how he had been to heaven, and the devil met him on his way back and clawed him for spite? Well, now don't you go to imitating Pod. There's more ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... 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 what was going forward in the Chamber of Representatives. ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... a grip of iron, and yet Taylor, that little village hound of an apothecary, said once you had microbes it didn't matter how strong you were—they were just as likely to be fatal as if you were a narrow-chested epileptic. ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... 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 ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... 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, and is ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... their abuse. Shortly afterward, the daughter of the herring-dealer fell sick, and a cry was raised that she was bewitched by the old women who had been refused the herrings. This girl was subject to epileptic fits. To discover the guilt of Amy Duny and Rose Cullender, the girl's eyes were blinded closely with a shawl, and the witches were commanded to touch her. They did so, and she was immediately seized with a ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... went stark, raving mad that minute. I once spent a night in the room of an epileptic who had delirium tremens, and learned a lot from him; some of it came to mind just when I needed it. If ever a man got ten piastres' worth of unexpected side-show it was that old Syrian with the alligator eyes. By the time I was quite out of breath there wasn't ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... 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 ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Criminologist • John T. McIntyre
... more than one child has been born with the same organ affected on the same side, the chances against mere coincidence are enormous. But perhaps the most remarkable and trustworthy fact is that given by Dr. Brown-Sequard,[63] namely, that many young guinea-pigs inherited an epileptic tendency from parents which had been subjected to a particular operation, inducing in the course of a few weeks a convulsive disease like epilepsy: and it should be especially noted that this eminent physiologist bred a large number of guinea-pigs from ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... to read in their newspaper (if newspaper they will still possess) as we can in ours: "At an inquest at Dudley yesterday on a woman who was fatally scalded whilst in a fit, it was stated that she had been an epileptic for years, and that her seven children had all been epileptics, and all had ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... is not 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 their hands this Sub-conscious Personality is capable of development, of tuition, and of ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead
... 1793 Mrs. 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
... songs, sometimes in Welsh and sometimes in English, but with the strange, weird intonation of a person in a dream. I have known something like this to take place before, but it has been in seizures of an epileptic kind, very unlike this case in their general characteristics. The mental processes seem to have been completely arrested by the shock, as the wheels of a watch or a musical box are ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... 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
... this way, you look up to your right, you will 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 ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... Doctor Wayn put him through a general examination, then a specific check for suggestibility, hypnotic index, reactions to the eleven basic drug groups, and susceptibility to tetanic and epileptic seizures. He jotted down his results on a pad, checked his figures, went to a cabinet, and ...
— The Status Civilization • Robert Sheckley
... by North in translating Plutarch. Another form of the word is 'falling-evil,' also used by North (see quotation, p. 26, l. 268). It is an interesting fact that the best authorities allow that Napoleon suffered from epileptic seizures towards the close of ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... 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 the thing, the fall of his body might have alarmed the garrison. Crawford, ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... without letting her finish, "an epileptic, who succumbed to a congestive attack! See! since you are in a bad humor, let us talk no more about that—you would grieve me, and that would ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... Pinchas in his natural voice. 'May a sudden death smite you! May the curtain fall on a gibbering epileptic!' ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... an honorable man, and has told you the truth," said Baron von Worndle, gravely. "Your violent accusation frightened him; and he fell into an epileptic fit. He is affected ...
— Andreas Hofer • Lousia Muhlbach
... endurance and great mental energy, as is proved by the cases of Julius Caesar and Napoleon. He was liable to mystical trances, in which some have found a confirmation of the supposition that he was epileptic. But these abnormal states were rare with him; in writing to the Galatians he has to go back fourteen years to the date when he was 'caught up into the third heaven,' The visions and voices which attended his active ministry prove nothing about his health. At that time anyone who ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... 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. But ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... Ulrika was engaged in prayer. Prayer with her was a sort of fanatical wrestling of the body as well as of the soul,—she was never contented unless by means of groans and contortions she could manage to work up by degrees into a condition of hysteria resembling a mild epileptic attack, in which state alone she considered herself worthy to approach the Deity. On this Occasion she had some difficulty to attain the desired result—her soul, as she herself expressed it, was "dry"—and her thoughts wandered,—though ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... sophisticated person, for the child and the philosopher; the new experience derives its significance from the character and organization of the previous experiences. To the peasant a comet, a plague, and an epileptic person may mean a divine portent, a visitation of God, a possession by the devil; to the scientific man they mean something quite different. The word "slavery" had very different connotations in the ancient world and today. ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... directly after, a passage even in that dense mass of people was cleared for two men, who bore forwards Prudence Hickson, lying rigid as a log of wood, in the convulsive position of one who suffered from an epileptic fit. They laid her down among the ministers who were gathered round the pulpit. Her mother came to her, sending up a wailing cry at the sight of her distorted child. Dr. Mather came down from the pulpit and stood over her, exorcising the devil in possession, ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... the old man's infirm temper, and the daughter's skillful use of it. He was unprepared for Flip's boldness and audacity, and when he saw that both barrels of the accusation had taken effect on the charcoal-burner, who was rising with epileptic rage, he fairly turned and fled. The old man would have followed him with objurgation beyond the door, but for the restraining hand ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... the razor on his leg Waiting until the shriek subsides. The epileptic on the bed Curves backward, clutching at ...
— Poems • T. S. [Thomas Stearns] Eliot
... 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
... The lovers in turn redouble 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 ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... bathroom there she lay, the fair young creature, stretched upon the floor and covered with a sheet. And looking so placid, so natural, and as if asleep. We knew what had happened. She was an epileptic: she had been seized with a convulsion and heart failure in her bath. The doctor had to come several miles. His efforts, like our previous ones, failed to bring her ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the Constitution? No! Everything was done; because we commenced with reparation, not with ruin. Accordingly, the state flourished. Instead of lying as dead, in a sort of trance, or exposed, as some others, in an epileptic fit, to the pity or derision of the world, for her wild, ridiculous, convulsive movements, impotent to every purpose but that of dashing out her brains against the pavement, Great Britain rose above the standard ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... 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 ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips
... collar at the back. 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 ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... life, raised far above the earth, but not yet in heaven. Below is seen the earthly life, poor humanity struggling helplessly with pain, infirmity, and death. The father brings his son, the possessed, or, as we should now say, the epileptic boy, who ofttimes falls into the water or into the fire, or lies grovelling on the earth, foaming and gnashing his teeth; the boy struggles in his arms—the rolling eyes, the distorted features, the spasmodic limbs are at once terrible and ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... discuss 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 me. I ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... this Letter reaches you, but you may be amused and glad to have it from me. Not that I have come into Suffolk on any cheerful Errand: I have come to bury dear old Mr. Crabbe! I suppose you have had some Letters of mine telling you of his Illness; Epileptic Fits which came successively and weakened him gradually, and at last put him to his Bed entirely, where he lay some while unable to move himself or to think! They said he might lie so a long time, since he eat and drank with fair Appetite: ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... Enviable enviinda. Envious enviema. Environs cxirkauxajxo. Envoy sendito. Envy envii. Epaulet epoleto. Ephemeral mallonga, efemera. Epic epopea. Epic epopeo. Epicure epikuristo. Epidemic epidemio. Epidermis epidermo. Epigram epigramo. Epilepsy epilepsio. Epileptic epilepsia. Epileptic (person) epilepsiulo. Epilogue epilogo. Epiphany Epifanio. Episcopacy episkopeco. Episode epizodo. Epistle letero. Epistolary letera. Epitaph epitafo. Epithet epiteto. Epitome resumo. Epitomise ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... Hill, a girl from the country who had once gone wrong, and who is now trying to keep straight on five dollars a week made in the sewing-room of one of the city's hospitals. Bettie Flynn, who lives at the City Home because of epileptic fits, also comes in occasionally. Bettie is a friend of Mrs. Mundy. Owing to kinlessness and inability to care for herself, owing, also, to there being nowhere else to which she could go, she has been forced to enter the Home. Her caustic ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... 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]
... or to the public, since nature had not given it at first any strength or goodness of constitution. For the same reason the women did not wash their new-born infants with water, but with wine, thus making some trial of their habit of body; imagining that sickly and epileptic children sink and die under the experiment, while healthy became more vigorous and hardy. Great care and art was also exerted by the nurses; for, as they never swathed the infants, their limbs had a freer turn, and their countenances a more liberal air; besides, they used ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... 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
... here is just 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 ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... living herself on nothing. She is small and slender like the women-saints of the Church. The poor feeding of those days must needs make women fine-bred, but lacking also in vital strength. The children die off in vast numbers: those pale roses are all nerves. Hence, will presently burst forth the epileptic dances of the fourteenth century. Meanwhile, towards the twelfth century, there come to be two weaknesses attached to this state of half-grown youth: by night somnambulism; in the daytime seeing of visions, trance, and the ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... line and our dead and wounded were brought back, Capt. Alexander was standing in the midst of our company talking to our Captain Grigg, one of our young men, Thomas Nowlin, a gallant soldier and a cousin of mine, was seized with an epileptic fit, when Captain Alexander was the first to his assistance, and, kneeling over him, did everything he could for him. If he had been one of his own men or even a brother he could not have shown more sympathetic interest. This greatly impressed me as to the real character ...
— The Southern Soldier Boy - A Thousand Shots for the Confederacy • James Carson Elliott
... 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 a drop ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... genuine, old-fashioned landed proprietor, a pious inhabitant of the steppes, sufficiently well educated,—according to the standards of that epoch,—rather crack-brained, if the truth must be told, and subject, in addition, to epileptic fits.... That also is an old-fashioned malady.... However, Andrei Nikolaevitch's attacks were quiet, and they generally terminated in a sleep and in a fit of melancholy.—He was kind of heart, courteous in manner, not devoid of some pomposity: I ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... of epilepsy also in animals born of parents having been rendered epileptic by the section of the ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... the area within its walls being nearly twenty acres, and it was built to accommodate 3,000 persons, but several additions in the shape of new wards, enlarged schools, and extended provision for the sick, epileptic and insane, have since been made. The whole establishment is supplied with water from an artesian well, and is such a distance from other buildings as to ensure the most healthy conditions. The chapel, ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... subject to fits, some of a very serious nature. Lying in bed, my leg encased in its plaster-of-paris cast, about ten o'clock one night, when just dozing off, I was frightened into wakefulness by a scream. A man, who turned out to be an escaped epileptic, was standing in the doorway screaming, his eyes bulging out of his head. He had escaped by striking the sentry over the head with the fire brazier, used to keep the sentry warm. Staring wildly about the room for a couple of seconds, he made ...
— S.O.S. Stand to! • Reginald Grant
... he was subject to epileptic attacks after his first campaign in Italy. Bourrienne was with him eleven years, and never saw him suffer from ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... who told me he was a great-grandson or descendant of Thomson who wrote the "Seasons." I thought him both great and grand in an incident which soon occurred. A burly, bull-necked fellow in the car was attacked with an epileptic fit. He roared, kicked, screamed like a wildcat; and among fifty men in the vehicle, I venture to say that only Thomson and I, in a lesser degree, showed any plain common sense. I darted at the epileptic, grappled with him, held him down by what might be called brutal kindness, for I held his ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... myths devised for the purpose of explaining the obscure phenomena of mental disease. If this be so, they afford an excellent collateral illustration of the belief in werewolves. The same mental habits which led men to regard the insane or epileptic person as a changeling, and which allowed them to explain catalepsy as the temporary departure of a witch's soul from its body, would enable them to attribute a wolf's nature to the maniac or idiot with cannibal appetites. And when the myth-forming process had got thus far, it would not stop ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... moment, Verkan Vall was afraid the fellow would have an apoplectic stroke, or an epileptic fit. Mastering himself, ...
— Last Enemy • Henry Beam Piper
... '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 ...
— James Gilmour of Mongolia - His diaries, letters, and reports • James Gilmour
... enabled us to escape him. Buxhowden pursues us—we scuttle. He hardly crosses the river to our side before we recross to the other. At last our enemy. Buxhowden, catches us and attacks. Both generals are angry, and the result is a challenge on Buxhowden's part and an epileptic fit on Bennigsen's. But at the critical moment the courier who carried the news of our victory at Pultusk to Petersburg returns bringing our appointment as commander in chief, and our first foe, ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... were not spoken in vain. Griffith's features were horribly distorted, his eyes rolled fearfully, and he fell to the ground, grinding his teeth, and foaming at the mouth. An epileptic fit! ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... quite old—twenty! Attention! This is the overture. It begins with an andante in C major, 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
... at this very 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 men! Miller, though Blake was the torment of his life, relaxed ...
— 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 without injuring her, and then made ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... the table. The grave-digger did the cooking, and did it very well. He was celebrated for this, and he would leave his fire to come in and dance and sing before and after every course. And yet this poor Father Bontemps was epileptic. Who would have thought it? He was fresh and strong, and merry as a young man. One day we found him in a ditch, struck down by his malady at nightfall. We carried him home with us, in a wheelbarrow, and we spent all night in caring for him. Three days afterward, he was at a wedding, ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... 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. One physician, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... that they had picked up a man on the North River docks in an epileptic fit and the only name they could find on him was my New York address. They thought he was going to die, he was cold and stiff for hours, and they had undertaken to reach me in order to identify him. But he did not die. He was ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... in his handkerchief, probably some token of sorcery: he offers nocturnal sacrifices, vestiges of which of a suspicious character have been found; and he worships a little skeleton he has made and which he always carries about with him. His answer to these charges is as follows:—the child was epileptic and died without his aid; the poisons he has bought for purposes of natural science; the image he carries in his handkerchief is that of Plato's monarch (vous Basileus), devotion to which is only natural in a professed Platonist; and as for the sacrifices, ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... complete cutting off of the frontal lobes of the brain, the centers of man's highest thought processes. Between these two extremes are the shock treatments in which an injection of insulin or metrazol into the blood stream causes the person to fall into a sort of epileptic fit during which he loses consciousness. Through a series of such shock treatments some of the higher nerve centers or nerve pathways are destroyed. By this process a person's fears may also be eliminated and he may be permanently or temporarily ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... 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 has been possessed ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... companies transport her back to Europe as soon as possible, and consign her to her mother, who lives in Paris. She should be placed in the care of a physician and under guardianship. She has been trained to do a certain dance, during which she falls into a pathologic condition not unlike an epileptic fit. She turns stiff and rigid as a block of wood, her eyes start from her head, she plucks at her clothes. Finally, she falls into a faint and loses consciousness of her surroundings. Such things do not belong on the stage. It would be an outrage, an insult to public opinion ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... that Brown-Sequard has bred during thirty years many thousand guinea-pigs from animals which had not been operated upon, and not one of these manifested the epileptic tendency. Nor has he ever seen a guinea-pig born without toes, which was not the offspring of parents which had gnawed off their own toes owing to the sciatic nerve having been divided. Of this latter fact thirteen instances ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... at seeing the terrified people rush off to the railway-station, and the queer garments in which they were clad. Shortly after Lady Burton was terribly frightened from another cause. Her husband had an epileptic fit, and it was some time before she and the doctors could bring him round again. Henceforth it became necessary for them to have always with them a resident doctor. They both of them disliked the idea ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... interest is still thin and sparse. It is valuable in itself, and it produces an occasional detached sensation. There was the case, in Dr Drummond's church, of placid-faced, saintly old Sandy MacQuhot, the epileptic. It used to be a common regret with Lorne Murchison that as sure as he was allowed to stay away from church Sandy would have a fit. That was his little boy's honesty; the elders enjoyed the fit and deprecated ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... Dorn. Life, yes ... yes ... It was amazing. But here it is different. What is it the correspondents say? 'All is confusion, there is nothing to report.' ... Yes, confusion. There are at present three poets, one lunatic, an epileptic, four workingmen and a scientist from Vienna, and two school teachers. They are the Council of Ten. Look, there is Muhsam, the one with the red vandyke. A poet. He used to recite ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... out jump the scissors; snip, clip, rip; the stuff is wisped up, brown—papered, tied, labelled, delivered, and the man is himself again, like a child just come out of a convulsion-fit. Think of a man's having some hundreds of these semi-epileptic seizures every day, and you need not wonder that he does not say much; these fits take the talk all ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... at first sight to be bound up in the acceptance of Lombroso's theory: but such is not the case. Lombroso himself declares that the type belongs to the born criminal only, and that the born criminal can be nothing more than an epileptic; criminality being a neurosis. It would thus seem that the type was but the indication of an organic defect which physically or psychically rendered the subject unable to adapt himself to the social condition; but not that unchangeable ideas, contradicting pure morality, were innate. ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll
... to resume her proper shape. In 1682 three women were executed at Exeter. Their witchcraft was of the same sort as that of the Bury witches. Little variety indeed appears in the English witchcraft as brought before the courts of law. They chiefly consist in hysterical, epileptic, or other fits, accompanied by vomiting of various witch-instruments of torture. The Exeter witches are memorable as the last executed ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... he went 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 the King ...
— Massimilla Doni • Honore de Balzac
... astonished us in the romances. There, too, is the same feverish strength, welding the fiery iron of his idea under forge-hammer repetitions—an emphasis that is somehow akin to weakness—a strength that is a little epileptic. He stands so far above all his contemporaries, and so incomparably excels them in richness, breadth, variety, and moral earnestness, that we almost feel as if he had a sort of right to fall oftener and more heavily than others; but this does ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... age. The assassin is pitied, but the victim is considered quite unpardonable. In his later manner Michelet is more Michelet than ever before. There is no common sense in it; it is simply wonderful! Neither art nor science, neither criticism nor narrative; only furies and fainting-spells and epileptic fits over matters which he never deigns to explain. Childish outcries—envies de femme grosse!—and a style, my friends!—not a single finished ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... demonstration 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 ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... even amused himself by incommoding me, as was then very easy; and that not from ill- nature, but mere clodlike incapacity to think, for he expected me to join the laugh. I did so, but it was phantom merriment. Later on, a man from Kansas had three violent epileptic fits, and though, of course, there were not wanting some to help him, it was rather superstitious terror than sympathy that his case evoked among his fellow-passengers. "Oh, I hope he's not going to die!" cried a woman; "it would ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... inquiry also show that degeneracy among criminals is sometimes inherited and sometimes acquired. It is inherited when the criminal is descended from insane, drunken, epileptic, scrofulous parents; it is often acquired when the criminal adopts and deliberately persists in a life of crime. The closeness of the connection between degeneracy and crime is, to a considerable extent, determined ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison |
