"Epileptic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... if your wish would be gratified. Your friend has had an epileptic fit, but the physical shock has started his mental machinery again. He has recovered his faculties; his memory is returning: he thinks and speaks coherently; he is as sane as ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... An instant of numbing silence fell. A swish! A cat on a small bear's back. A scene impossible! A hairy tornado, rolling, twisting, flopping, yelling, screeching, roaring, and howling, tore, bit, scratched, clawed, and walloped all over the place. An epileptic nebula; a maelstrom that revolved in every way known to man at the same instant; a prodigy of tooth and claw. If that fight were magnified a hundred times, a glimpse of it would kill; as it was, myself and the clothing store boy clung weakly ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips
... was possessed of a Jinn, the common Eastern explanation of an epileptic fit long before the days of the Evangel. See ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... something there, 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 rhymes in ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... Tommy 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. ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... but also many children who have no 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 ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... stamp, and yell in reply, that they will give three more cows. The father-in-law (an old deluder, overpaid at the beginning) accepts four, and rises to bind the bargain. The whole party, the young lady included, then falling into epileptic convulsions, and screeching, whistling, stamping, and yelling together - and nobody taking any notice of the young lady (whose charms are not to be thought of without a shudder) - the noble savage is considered married, ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... 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, they are pious prayers, offered outside ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... of Willis's career afford a melancholy contrast to its brilliant opening. Health, success, prosperity—all had deserted him, and nothing remained but the editorial chair, to which he clung even after epileptic attacks had resulted in paralysis and gradual softening of the brain. The failure of his mental powers was kept secret as long as possible, but in November, 1866, he yielded to the entreaties of his wife and children, knocked off work for ever, and went home to die. His last few months were ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... third and fourth generation. It is no uncommon thing to see the grandmother's red hair reappear in her granddaughter, though her own child's hair was as black as a raven's wing. A crooked toe, a wart, a malformation, an epileptic tendency, a swart or fair complexion, may disappear in all the children of a family, and show itself again in the grand-or great-grandchildren. Mental and moral conditions reappear in like manner. In medical ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur
... business, and were amused 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 of having a stranger spying about them very much; but it was inevitable, for the epilepsy was ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... about, but he was like a worm-eaten plant, there seemed to be but little life within him. Old Hetfalusy, on the other hand, had altogether succumbed to his woe, he had taken to his bed, and was frequently tormented by epileptic fits. ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... hear it said that a child that was conceived when the father was in an exhilarated condition is apt to be epileptic, or nervous, or insane, and what not. This is also to be taken with a grain of salt. A chronic alcoholic has a defective germ-plasm, and his children are apt to be defective. But a glass of wine at a wedding banquet cannot affect the previously formed spermatozoa. And the statements about children ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... and used a divining rod to find the proper place to dig 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 known ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous
... back with an impotent scream, and the man Pietro caught her in his arms. Quivering and convulsed, she writhed in an epileptic fit. ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... there is a far-reaching independence between the apparent mental variations and the seriousness of the brain affection. Light hysteric states may produce a strong absenting of the mind while severe epileptic conditions of the brain may be accompanied by very slight mental changes. Every neurasthenic state may play havoc with mental life, while grave brain destructions may only shade slightly the character or the intellect. To ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... got your choice, my friend. This engagement has to be broken off; and the Mannerings don't want to be too hard on you. Was it broken through D, T. or epileptic fits? Sorry I can't offer you a better exchange unless you'd prefer hereditary insanity. Say the word and I'll tell 'em it's fits. All Simla knows about that scene on the Ladies' Mile. Come! I'll give you five minutes to think ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... 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 at the next corner, and they knew ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... 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
... to adventure and blood and thunder; they are not of the analytical school of fiction. Judging from them," he added accusingly, "you have a tendency to the romantic." He spoke reluctantly as though saying I had a tendency to epileptic fits or ...
— My Buried Treasure • Richard Harding Davis
... undoubted inheritance of disease is hardly a difficulty, because the 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 state of weakness, deformity, or sores, was sometimes inherited. It is, however, ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... core that gives the point and the splendid audacity to French literature and art,—its vehemence and impatience of restraint. It is the salt of their speech, the nitre of their wit. When morbid, it gives that rabid and epileptic tendency which sometimes shows itself in Victor Hugo. In this great writer, however, it more frequently takes the form of an aboriginal fierceness and hunger that glares and bristles, ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... 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 of ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... falsification entirely disproportionate to any discernible end in view, engaged in by a person who, at the time of observation, cannot definitely be declared insane, feebleminded, or epileptic. Such lying rarely, if ever, centers about a single event; although exhibited in very occasional cases for a short time, it manifests itself most frequently by far over a period of years, or even a life time. It represents a trait rather than an episode. Extensive, ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... protervities that have already 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 not reconcile us to seeing him profit by the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of being alarmed by those frightful symptoms she related, took a more cheerful view directly. "Then do not alarm yourself unnecessarily," he said. "It was only an epileptic fit." ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... in arts there; studied at Heidelberg, and coming to Edinburgh graduated in medicine with high distinction in 1868; in 1872 became professor of Forensic Medicine at King's College, London, and afterwards physician to the National Hospital for the Paralysed and Epileptic; his most notable work has been done in connection with the brain, and his many experiments on the brains of living animals have resulted in much valuable information, embodied in his various writings; is editor and co-founder of the ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... word. Augusta is fifteen years old, weighs 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 ...
— History of the Donner Party • C.F. McGlashan
... presented to the Legislature "relating to and regulating marriage" include among the items "prohibition of marriage within six months after a divorce has been granted from a former spouse; and forbidding of marriage between persons either one of whom is epileptic, imbecile, feeble-minded, insane, an habitual drunkard, affected with a venereal disease, or addicted to the use of opium, morphine, or cocaine." This indicates the trend of newer laws regulating marriage. Is this trend ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... breaking loose from long confinement, he ranges in all the exuberance of joy; and especially when he flushes almost his first covey, and the game falls dead before him, his mental powers are quite overcome, and he falls into an epileptic fit. ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... with his chin. Threading her way towards him, she happened to look up. By the rails of the pier above she saw her husband. He was leaning there, looking intently down; his tall broad figure made the people on each side of him seem insignificant. The clean-shaved, square-cut face, with those almost epileptic, forceful eyes, had a stillness and intensity beside which the neighbouring faces seemed to disappear. She saw him very clearly, even noting the touch of silver in his dark hair, on each side under his straw hat; noting ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... (for the 'us' means not the man and the demon, but the demon and his fellows); and the recognition of Christ's holiness, which lashes unholiness into a paroxysm of mingled despair and hate. Does this sound like a madman, or an epileptic, or like a spirit which knew more than men knew, and trembled and hated more than they could do? There is nothing more terrible than the picture, self-drawn in these spasmodic words, of a spirit which, by its very foulness, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... admiration for the opera. It was expressed in a manner peculiar to Jernington that became almost epileptic, ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... beginning to get warm, and I of course to get better. There has been a good deal of nervous headache here this Ramadan. I had to attend the Kadee, and several more. My Turkish neighbour at Karnac has got a shaitan (devil), i.e. epileptic fits, and I was sent for to exorcise him, which I am endeavouring to do with nitrate of silver, etc.; but I fear imagination will kill him, so I advise him to go to Cairo, and leave the devil-haunted house. I have this minute killed the first ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... 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
... great shout 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
... eugenic experiments. Feeble-mindedness, in so many ways a social evil, is readily reproduced, and the weak-minded are easily controlled by the sex instinct. To prevent this certain State legislatures have forbidden the marriage of any feeble-minded or epileptic woman under the age of forty-five. It is well known that insanity is a family trait, and that criminal insanity is liable to recur if those who are afflicted are permitted to indulge in parenthood. Certain States accordingly annul ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... '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 ...
— James Gilmour of Mongolia - His diaries, letters, and reports • James Gilmour
... most vile and pernicious vice. The drunkard, deprived of the sense and reason given us by God, profanes the donations of the divinity: he debases himself to the condition of brutes; unable even to guide his steps, he staggers and falls as if he were epileptic; he hurts and even risks killing himself; his debility in this state exposes him to the ridicule and contempt of every person that sees him; he makes in his drunkenness, prejudicial and ruinous bargains, and injures his fortune; he ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... were some unlucky circumstances which, to minds so predisposed, might seem to indicate that a crime had been perpetrated. The fourteen Doctors who deliberated on the King's case contradicted each other and themselves. Some of them thought that his fit was epileptic, and that he should be suffered to have his doze out. The majority pronounced him apoplectic, and tortured him during some hours like an Indian at a stake. Then it was determined to call his complaint a fever, and to administer doses of bark. One physician, however, protested against this course, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... once. Smerdyakov went to the cellar for something and fell down from the top of the steps. Fortunately, Marfa Ignatyevna was in the yard and heard him in time. She did not see the fall, but heard his scream—the strange, peculiar scream, long familiar to her—the scream of the epileptic falling in a fit. They could not tell whether the fit had come on him at the moment he was descending the steps, so that he must have fallen unconscious, or whether it was the fall and the shock that had caused the fit ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... lineaments of him, 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 had treasured up, prior to the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... 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 ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... from the lord of the geniture, or where there is an aspect between the moon and Mercury, and neither behold the horoscope, or Saturn and Mars shall be lord of the present conjunction or opposition in Sagittarius or Pisces, of the sun or moon, such persons are commonly epileptic, dote, demoniacal, melancholy: but see more of these aphorisms in the above-named Pontanus. Garcaeus, cap. 23. de Jud. genitur. Schoner. lib. 1. cap. 8, which he hath gathered out of [1290]Ptolemy, Albubater, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... scrambled up a projecting ledge of rock, fastened the ladder by tying it to the roots of a tree which grew midway up the rock. Here they found a footing for the whole party, which was, of course, small in number. In scaling the second precipice, however, one of the party was seized with an epileptic fit, to which he was subject, brought on, perhaps, by terror in the act of climbing the ladder. He could neither ascend nor descend; moreover, if they had thrown him down, apart from the cruelty of the thing, the fall of his body might have alarmed the garrison. Crawford, therefore, ordered ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... 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 ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... something like this: "You snivelling defective." (Cough) "You septic idiot." (Cough) "You poisonous and polluted ass." (Cough, cough, cough) "You scarlet imbecile." (I have to water down the increasing richness of his epithets.) "You last diminutive purple embryo of an epileptic stock, do you suppose I don't know that? No good? Of course it's no good—yet. I got to wait for another six months. And you can take it from me, if a fellow knows what he wants, and doesn't try to get it—doesn't know how to get it—in six months—and doesn't find out—he's ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... clever ruse. It is evident I loaned myself. I surrendered adroitly to my idiotic senses. Therefore for that hour I was completely mad. What happened in the room? Ah, what a grotesque memory it makes. Mallare knocking his fists against the air. Mallare throwing himself around like an epileptic. Sinking his fingers into nothing—a shadow boxer pummelling frenziedly at space. That ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... 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
... pleasures. We are not only admitted to contemplate the pomp and majesty of his world-wide fame, we are also admitted to the sordid circumstances of Goethe's "home." And our awe and reverence are turned into pity. We pity the miserable husband of a drunken and epileptic wife rescued from the gutter; we pity even more the unhappy father of a degraded son, who inherited all the vices of one parent without inheriting the genius of ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... that momentary vertigo, often produced by changing from a horizontal to a vertical position, seasickness, pain in movement in cases of meningitis, epileptic attacks at night, etc., may be by this explained. These views of Luys are accepted as true, but to a less extent than taught by Luys. The prevalent idea that a lesion of one hemisphere produces a paralysis ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 520, December 19, 1885 • Various
... Maria's aversion to Pereo since the accident arose from a belief that some assistance might have been rendered by him. But it was pointed out by Sanchez that Pereo had, a few moments before, fallen under one of those singular, epileptic-like strokes to which he was subject, and not only was unfit, but even required the entire care of Sanchez at the time. He did not attend the funeral, nor did Mrs. Saltonstall; but the family was ...
— Maruja • Bret Harte
... 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
... 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
... 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
... Epileptic attacks and other forms of convulsions are suppressed, but never cured, by bromides which benumb and paralyze the brain and nerve centers. All that these sedatives accomplish is to produce in the course of time idiocy and the different ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... foundation of any successful 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 the mainstay of ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... every archbishop and bishop deported to the Antarctic regions civil war would break out in a week. All records were broken by the Liberal Party, who rose as one man and cheered Mr. Tooth's declaration for ten minutes, many Members standing on their heads and waving their legs with epileptic fervour. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 8, 1914 • Various
... the country, 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, which has several stained windows, is capable of seating 800 persons and in it, on May ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... 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
... instruction concerning the management and protective care of common emergencies. The instruction is practical and rational. It covers such emergencies as: sprains, fractures, dislocations, wounds, bruises, sudden pain, fainting, epileptic attacks, unconsciousness, drowning, electric shock, and ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... case was that 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 an unsuccessful attempt at suicide. His ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... frequently performed in their favor. Whenever the monks made some solemn procession, promenading through the streets the relics of some saint, it was not uncommon to see a franc-mitou, paralyzed, crippled or epileptic, endeavoring to touch the sacred casket; in vain would the attempt be made to keep him at a distance; he redoubled his efforts, and scarcely had he succeeded in gluing his lips to the sacred coffer when immediately the cripple threw ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... Sterne's peculiar genius. The visit of the author, the baker's wife and her daughter (the former lady's maid) to the graveyard is Yorickian in flavor, and the plucking of nettles from the grave of the dead epileptic is a direct borrowing. Attempts to be immorally, sensuously suggestive in the manner of Sterne are found in the so-called chapter on "Button-holes," here cast in a more Shandean vein, and in the adventure "die ngstliche Nacht,"—in the latter case resembling more the less frank, more insinuating ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... mortal enemy, but he shall forthwith fall! I hate him—I hate him—I hate him!" and as he pronounced these words, he struck the arm of the chair in which he was sitting violently, over and over again, and then rose like one in an epileptic fit. "To-morrow! to-morrow! oh, happy day!" he murmured, "when the sun rises, no other rival shall that brilliant king of space possess but me. That man shall fall so low that when people look at the abject ruin my anger shall ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Syphilis, phimosis, sexual abuses, uterine disease, and the use of alcoholic liquors are prominent predisposing causes. Many of the causes treated by us have been brought on by masturbation. Others are the results of injury to the head. Often fracture of the skull is followed by epileptic attacks. ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... recollection of Misha's father, Andrei Nikolaevitch Polteff. He was a 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: ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... mount of transfiguration, a dumb, epileptic, and lunatic boy was brought by his father to those disciples who were awaiting ...
— Miracles of Our Lord • George MacDonald
... bluing, burnt cork, English mustard, Easter dyes and the yolks of a dozen eggs over himself, seasoning to taste with red peppers. Then he spread a large tarpaulin on the floor and lay down on it and had an epileptic fit, the result being a picture which he labeled Revolt, or Collision Between Two Heavenly Bodies, or Premature Explosion of a Custard Pie, or something else equally appropriate. The Futurists ought to make quite ...
— Cobb's Bill-of-Fare • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... extreme weakness of the spine and oscillations of the hands when spread horizontally with the fingers and thumbs wide apart. This may in one way be accounted for by the difficulty that men have in obtaining wives, owing to the scarcity of women. Apoplectic and epileptic fits and convulsions were not of very frequent occurrence, but they seemed severe when they did occur. The fire cure was usually applied in order to drive away the spirits that were supposed to have entered the body, but, all the same, these fits at times ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... persons who lose weight in winter, and with more who fail in flesh in the spring, which is our season of greatest depression in health,—the season when with us choreas are apt to originate[5] or to recur, and when habitual epileptic fits become more frequent in such as are the victims ...
— Fat and Blood - An Essay on the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria • S. Weir Mitchell
... weakness—a broken cog in the machine which slips and throws everything out of gear, no matter how big the dynamo? I tell you, a dipsomaniac is no more to be blamed for lack of will power or moral strength than is a kleptomaniac, or than an epileptic is to be blamed for having fits. It's a disease. I'm giving it to you ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... 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 ...
— The Southern Soldier Boy - A Thousand Shots for the Confederacy • James Carson Elliott
... cried, 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
... while a boy, relates that he had violent pains in the bowels at first, then convulsions, in consequence of which he was confined to his bed two months, since when the attacks of convulsions have increased in frequency, are now daily, accompanied often by ten to twenty epileptic fits, his right arm is paralysed, and the physicians tell him that he can never regain the use of his limbs. In one factory were found in the dipping-house four men, all epileptic and afflicted with severe colic, and eleven boys, several of whom were already epileptic. In short, this ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... that he was subject to epileptic attacks after his first campaign in Italy. Bourrienne was with him eleven years, and never saw him suffer from an attack ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... world, and death by sin." Death of the body is the point at which all diseases, ailments and infirmities aim; and the death, the eternal death, of the soul is the point at which all sins aim. "Death is the wages of sin." "And ye are witnesses of these things." In relieving insane, idiotic, epileptic and dumb people of the mental ailments afflicting them, he always removed the cause by casting out the devils or evil spirits as the cause ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... 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 the sake of the Army to which ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... fear, or an unexpected fright, often produces epileptic fits, and other dangerous disorders. Many young people have lost their lives or their senses by the foolish attempts of producing violent alarm, and the mind has been thrown into such disorders as never again to act with regularity. A settled dread and anxiety not only dispose the body to diseases, ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... from 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; they had no swaddling bands; the children grew up free ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... passion That in the natures of their lords rebel; Bring oil to fire, snow to their colder moods; Renege, affirm, and turn their halcyon beaks With every gale and vary of their masters, Knowing naught, like dogs, but following.— A plague upon your epileptic visage! Smile you my speeches, as I were a fool? Goose, an I had you upon Sarum plain, I'd drive ye cackling ...
— The Tragedy of King Lear • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... from an old colored man who used to work for my father years ago. Queer how such things stick to one, isn't it? But I don't just know how to describe what Burton told me about his daughter in any other way. She wasn't an epileptic. That's a thing one goes down under; and her case was just the reverse. She was, as a rule, propped up in a chair, as weak as a kitten; but when these things took her, she grew immensely strong ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Criminologist • John T. McIntyre
... friend, whom he believed to be dead,[3] might be taken by those present for the agitation and trembling[4] which accompanied miracles. Popular opinion required that the divine virtue should manifest itself in man as an epileptic and convulsive principle. Jesus (if we follow the above hypothesis) desired to see once more him whom he had loved; and, the stone being removed, Lazarus came forth in his bandages, his head covered with a winding-sheet. This reappearance ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... Epilepsy.—1. Apoplexy mostly happens in people over thirty, whereas epilepsy generally occurs under that ago; at any rate for the first time. A person who has epileptic fits over thirty, has generally suffered from them for some years. 2. Again, in apoplexy, the body is paralyzed; and, therefore, has not the convulsions which take place in epilepsy. 3. The peculiar snoring will also distinguish apoplexy ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... Saturn was stationary in the ascending degree, the Prince ought to have been injured by a horse, and also to have received a blow on the left side of the head, near the ear; but reprehensibly omitted both these ceremonies. A predisposition to fever and epileptic attacks was indicated by the condition of the House of Sickness. The newspapers described, a few years since, a serious attack of fever; but as most persons have some experience of the kind, the fulfilment of the prediction ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... malady 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. ...
— Doctor and Patient • S. Weir Mitchell
... where this affair is discussed, you would conclude the French to be more physically miserable than any people on the glove. Youths, in apparent good health, have internal disorders, or concealed infirmities—some are near-sighted—others epileptic—one is nervous, and cannot present a musquet—another is rheumatic, and cannot carry it. In short, according to their account, they are a collection of the lame, the halt, and the blind, and fitter to ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... health was poor. He was epileptic, his strength undermined by incessant debauches; yet let a nation fancying him months away put on insurgent airs, and on that nation he descended as the thunder does. In his campaigns time and again he overtook his own messengers. A phantom in a ballad ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... of my practice of homoeopathy I was called to see a young man recently attacked with "epileptic fits." As he was going immediately to New York, with his sister, I advised them to call on the late Dr. John F. Gray, with whom I became acquainted during my first visit to New York. On reaching New York they called on Dr. Gray, and the young man remained under his treatment for several weeks. ...
— Personal Experience of a Physician • John Ellis
... once we had thought her dead, a change took place for the better, and the child began slowly to mend. For years, however, that struggle for life left its traces on her, not only in serious lung-delicacy but also in a form of epileptic fits. In her play she would suddenly stop, and become fixed for about a minute, and then go on again as though nothing had occurred. On her mother a ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... of the drunkard or the debauchee. Intellectual blemish will almost always accompany material blemish. The soul will be attacked simultaneously with the body; and it matters but little whether the victim be imbecile, mad, epileptic, possessed of criminal instincts, or only vaguely threatened with slight mental derangement: the most frightful moral penalty that a supreme justice could invent has followed actions which, as a rule, cause less ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... 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 ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... 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. ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead
... above my head Begins irascibly to flare and fret, Wheezing into its epileptic jet, Reminding me I ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 - Edited by Sir Edward Howard Marsh • Various
... 9th of May, 1865, that Hamilton was in Dublin for the last time. A few days later he had a violent attack of gout, and on the 4th of June he became alarmingly ill, and on the next day had an attack of epileptic convulsions. However, he slightly rallied, so that before the end of the month he was again at work at the "Elements." A gratifying incident brightened some of the last days of his life. The National Academy of Science in America had then been just formed. A list of foreign Associates had to ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... 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 to reproduce ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... 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 ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... By one of those turns, however, which it pleases Providence for his own wise purposes frequently to ordain, to mock our best hopes and baffle our most sanguine expectations, this admirable woman was, contrary to every antecedent prognostic, visited in her travail with epileptic fits, in which she expired, "leaving," (as the sublime Burke no less truly than pathetically said on the death of doctor Johnson,) "not only nothing to fill her place, but nothing that has a tendency to ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... of wine. I am speaking the truth. I assure you that this glance has haunted my dreams; the very rustle of her dress was more than I could stand at last. I really began to think that I might become epileptic. I could never have believed that I could be moved to such a frenzy. It was essential, indeed, to be reconciled, but by then it was impossible. And imagine what I did then! To what a pitch of stupidity a man can be brought by frenzy! Never undertake anything in a frenzy, ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... cooper's widow, who had managed to pay her premiums for one year, but had been unable to continue the payment for the quite sufficient reason that she had been in the hospital, fell headlong to the floor in epileptic convulsions when she ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... in 1127 by St. Bernard, who installed the Blessed Humbert as abbot, an epileptic Cistercian, whom he had cured by a miracle. At that time there were apparitions in the convent; a legend relates that two angels came and cut one of the lilies planted in the cemetery every time one ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... 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 animals which had not been ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... epileptic tendencies—as McPherson himself admits—had taken his benefactor's death terribly to heart, and had brooded over it day and night. Is there any reason to doubt that in such an unbalanced nature, this brooding, coupled by ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... hitherto been comparatively of the calm and melancholy kind, broke out into the most violent and phrenetic exhibitions. He sometimes raved incoherently, for hours together, against the Squire; often, in the midst of his speeches, he was assailed with epileptic fits, during which he displayed the strangest contortions and most laughable gestures; he threw entirely aside the decent coat he had worn for some time back, and habitually attired himself in the old and threadbare raiment, which he had worn after he and Martin had been so unceremoniously ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... that his disability was the development of confirmed epilepsy, and he expresses the opinion that this was due to a wound from a buckshot. This physician, while not giving epilepsy as the cause of death, says that "had he lived to die a natural death he certainly would have died an insane epileptic." ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 8: Grover Cleveland, First Term. • Grover Cleveland
... matter the State has already recognised its public obligation to provide remedial aid in its provision for the education and lodging of the blind, the deaf and the dumb, and in the measures taken within recent years for the special education of the defective and the epileptic. The provision for these purposes may indeed be justified on the grounds that the expense of the education of children of the industrial classes so afflicted is beyond the powers of any one individual, or ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... on nervous disorders, does not hesitate to recommend amulets in epileptic disorders. "Take," says he, "some fresh peony roots, cut them into square bits, and hang them round the neck, changing them as often as they dry." It is not improbable that the hint was taken from this circumstance for the anodyne necklaces, which, some time ago, were in such ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... 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 ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... first public 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 ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... exceptions to the general rule should in all ages have attracted the attention of medical men, and that literature should be replete with such instances. Pechlin and Muas record instances of painless births. The Ephemerides records a birth as having occurred during asphyxia, and also one during an epileptic attack. Storok also speaks of birth during unconsciousness in an epileptic attack; and Haen and others describe cases occurring during the coma attending apoplectic attacks. King reports the histories of two married women, fond mothers and anticipating the event, who gave birth ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... 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
... towards the ceiling; then she would burst into tears, and it was not till some half-hour had passed that she grew calm as usual. Her father, knowing her hysterical tendencies, was always excessively anxious about this trait in his youngest girl, and feared the attack to be a species of epileptic fit. Not so her sister Julia. Julia had found Out what was the cause. At the moment before the jumping, only an exceptionally sensitive ear situated in the chimney-nook could have caught from down the flue the beat of a man's footstep along the highway ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... it lasted until midnight. For fourteen hours the old people did not leave 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 ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... 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, Buxhowden, is vanquished; we can now turn our thoughts to the second, Bonaparte. But as it ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... I am sorry to say, had a good deal of trouble with some of our men here. One disappeared directly we arrived, and has never been seen since. Another came off suffering from delirium tremens and epileptic fits, brought on by drink. His cries and struggles were horrible to hear and witness. It took four strong men to hold him, and the doctor was up with him all last night. Nearly all the ships that come here have been at sea for a long time, and the men are simply wild when they ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... states that in the case of an old epileptic who had been accustomed to take nitrate of silver as a remedy, the choroid plexuses were remarkably dark, and from their surface could be scraped a brownish black, soot-like material, and a similar substance was found lying quite free in ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... foot and doused in the water until they were cured—or killed. Even the embraces of prostitutes, for some peculiar reason, were recommended as a cure for insanity.[46] In 1788, in Bristol, a drunken epileptic, one George Larkins, was brought into church, and seven clergymen solemnly set themselves to the task of exorcising the possessing demon. Whereupon Satan swore 'by his infernal den'—an oath, says the chronicler, nowhere to be found but in Bunyan. Under date of October 25, 1739, John Wesley also ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... that they are by their nature plainly, like the last, meant as preservatives against unseen malarias or contagions, possible or impossible. He assists every month with his children at the mysteries of the Orphic priests; and finally, whenever he sees an epileptic patient, he spits in his own bosom to avert the ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... mistletoe has so long and so persistently been prescribed as a cure for the falling sickness. As mistletoe cannot fall to the ground because it is rooted on the branch of a tree high above the earth, it seems to follow as a necessary consequence that an epileptic patient cannot possibly fall down in a fit so long as he carries a piece of mistletoe in his pocket or a decoction of mistletoe in his stomach. Such a train of reasoning would probably be regarded even now as cogent by a large portion of ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... the seaman's trick of thinking of the weather first thing in the morning, and this little thing wrought a change in my view of him. His madness was seemingly like that of an epileptic, and when it passed he was a simple creature with ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... of sordidly interested motives. His great private wealth enabled him the other day to find bail, at a moment's notice, to the amount of L40,000. On the other hand, his enemies diagnose him after the manner of Lombroso, and find him to be a degenerate and an epileptic, ungovernably irritable, vain, mendacious, arrogant, sometimes quite irresponsible for his actions. A really strong man he can scarcely be; scarcely a man of true political insight, else he would not have tried to play the despot with no plausible ideal to allege in defense of his usurpation. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... by his means, to have gratified his friends in England with representations of this country and its inhabitants, which no other person on board could delineate with the same accuracy and elegance. He had always been subject to epileptic fits, one of which seized him on the mountains of Terra del Fuego, and this disorder being aggravated by a bilious complaint which he contracted on board the ship, at length put an end to his life. It was at first ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... 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 ...
— The K-Factor • Harry Harrison (AKA Henry Maxwell Dempsey)
... yards distant, all of them aiming toward her heart, she appeared to wake up. She shrieked, her eyes abnormally dilated by the horror of the reality that so soon was to take place. Her cheeks were covered with tears. She tugged at the ligatures with the vigor of an epileptic. ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... 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 ...
— Archibald Malmaison • Julian Hawthorne
... 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 frequent, and it is likewise easily evaded ...
— Consanguineous Marriages in the American Population • George B. Louis Arner
... Telmak, and then to Denmark). On his arrival at Cape Francois, Denmark was sold with others of the slaves to a planter who owned a considerable estate. On his next trip, however, Captain Vesey learned that the boy was to be returned to him as unsound and subject to epileptic fits. The laws of the place permitted the return of a slave in such a case, and while it has been thought that Denmark's fits may have been feigned in order that he might have some change of estate, there was quite enough proof in the matter ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... he would be quite contented if he could save fifty pounds a-year and his books), but for your mother and yourself; and a fresh access of emotional excitement, all the nervous anxiety of a journey to London on such a business, might have ended in a paralytic or epileptic affection. Now we have him here snug; and the worst news we can give him will be better than what he will make up his mind for. ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... instantly followed by the scandalous marriage and elevation of Michael the Fourth. The expectations of Zoe were, however, disappointed: instead of a vigorous and grateful lover, she had placed in her bed a miserable wretch, whose health and reason were impaired by epileptic fits, and whose conscience was tormented by despair and remorse. The most skilful physicians of the mind and body were summoned to his aid; and his hopes were amused by frequent pilgrimages to the baths, and to the tombs of the most popular saints; the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... from the medium, and the eventual effect on the latter is invariably evil, as is evinced by the large number of such sensitives who have gone either morally or psychically to the bad—some becoming epileptic, some taking to drink, others falling under influences which induced them to stoop to fraud ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... with you and us by the time 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 ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... it is believed that those who are insane or epileptic are "possessed of devils." (Tylor, "Prim. Cult.," vol. ii., pp. 123-126.) Sickness is caused by evil spirits entering into the sick person. (Eastman's "Sioux.") The spirits of animals are much feared, and their departure out of the body of the invalid is a cause of ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... the common soldier at this stage of the war would have thrown an ordinary quartermaster of latter day service into an epileptic fit, it was so ponderous in size and enormous in quantities—a perfect household outfit. A few days before this the soldier had received his first two months' pay, all in new crisp bank notes, fresh from the State banks or banks of deposit. It can be ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... had ever lived in the house, an unimpeachable ghost. All Miss Pew's young ladies believed firmly in that ghost; and there was a legend of a frizzy-haired girl from Barbados who had seen the ghost, and had incontinently gone out of one epileptic fit into another, until her father had come in a fly—presumably from Barbados—and carried her away for ever, epileptic to ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... 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 a ...
— Gambara • Honore de Balzac
... controlled by the single lever—chemical dyes. Of even more vital moment is chemistry in the domain of health: the pitiful calls of our hospitals for local anesthetics to alleviate suffering on the operating table, the frantic appeals for the hypnotic that soothes the epileptic and staves off his seizure, the almost furious demands for remedy after remedy, that came in the early years of the war, are still ringing in the hearts of many of us. No wonder that our small army of chemists is grimly determined not to give up the independence ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... seem to care what he did. He once broke a large stick over the back of a slave and at another time the ivory butt-end of a long coach whip over the head of another. This last was attacked with epileptic fits some months after, and has ever since been subject to them, and occasionally to violent ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... beef-steaks on equal terms with Martin Burney. Life is short, but full of mirth and pastime, did we not so soon forget what we have laughed at, perhaps that we may not remember what we have cried at! Sarratt, the chess-player, was an extraordinary man. He had the same tenacious, epileptic faculty in other things that he had at chess, and could no more get any other ideas out of his mind than he could those of the figures on the board. He was a great reader, but had not the least taste. Indeed the violence of his memory tyrannised over and ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... criminal is a victim of that which I will call (seeing that science has not yet solved this problem) criminal neurosis, which is very analogous to epileptic neurosis, but which is not in itself sufficient to make one a criminal. Our adversaries had the idea that the mere possession of a crooked nose or a slanting skull stamped a man as predisposed by birth to murder or theft. But a man may he a born criminal, that is to say, he may have ...
— The Positive School of Criminology - Three Lectures Given at the University of Naples, Italy on April 22, 23 and 24, 1901 • Enrico Ferri
... of Ahmed, the son of Abdallah and Aminah (usually known as Mohammed, or "he who will be praised,"); reads like a chapter in the "Thousand and One Nights." He was a camel-driver, born in Mecca. He seems to have been an epileptic and he suffered from spells of unconsciousness when he dreamed strange dreams and heard the voice of the angel Gabriel, whose words were afterwards written down in a book called the Koran. His work as a caravan leader carried him all over Arabia and he was constantly falling in with Jewish merchants ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... seems 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 ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll
... frankly consider by what means the number of these unfortunates may be reduced. If we fail to do this we convict ourselves of cowardice or impotence. We pile up our millions in buildings for the insane, the feeble-minded, the vicious, the epileptic, and plume ourselves upon our munificence. But if all these unfortunates could be redeemed from their thralldom, and these countless millions turned back into the channels of trade, civilization would take on a new meaning. Here is one of the problems that calls aloud to education ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... behind him with all kinds of instruments and vessels in their hands. Cambyses had, only a few minutes before, recovered consciousness, after lying for more than an hour in one of those awful fits, so destructive both to mind and body, which we call epileptic. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... capricious. His temper was often sullen, and when in one of his gloomy moods he would spend the whole evening in his farm kitchen in morose silence. This state of mind was in part due to physical infirmity. As a child he had been subject to epileptic fits, and though these grew less frequent as he advanced to manhood, he never entirely shook them off, and during his married life a long spell of gloomy misanthropy would sometimes end in the return of one of these attacks. ...
— More Tales of the Ridings • Frederic Moorman
... action seems ever to have been taken in the matter. In Connecticut, however, in 1895 when a law (Laws, ch. 325) was enacted forbidding the marriage of the feeble-minded and epileptic, a provision respecting the congenitally deaf and blind came near being included. Annals, xl., 1895, ...
— The Deaf - Their Position in Society and the Provision for Their - Education in the United States • Harry Best
... milk, provoke a vomit; to do which, hold down the tongue, and put a quill dipped in sweet almonds, down the throat. If it come from the worms, give such things as will kill the worms. If there be a fever, with respect to that also, give coral smaragad and elk's hoof. In the fit, give epileptic water, as lavender water, and rub with oil of amber, or hang a peony root, and elk's hoof smaragad, about ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... put as to the probability of fits terminating in epilepsy; or, on the other hand, as to the ground for hope in any case that epileptic attacks, which have already often recurred, will eventually cease. In the first place, no conclusion can safely be drawn from the severity of a convulsion, nor from its general character, as to the probability ...
— The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases • Charles West, M.D.
... temperament. He was primarily a neurologist, the bent of his genius was toward the investigation of facts that could be objectively demonstrated. His first interest in hysteria, dating from as far back as 1862, was in hystero-epileptic convulsive attacks, and to the last he remained indifferent to all facts which could not be objectively demonstrated. That was the secret of the advances he was enabled to make in neurology. For purely psychological investigation he had no liking, and probably no aptitude. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... would no more award the death penalty if the motive has been exclusively political, because they are much less dangerous than the criminal born. On the other hand, commitment to the asylum of the epileptic and the hysteric would be a practical measure, especially in France, where ridicule kills them. Martyrs are venerated and ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... an ominous silence brought on a coolness of the strangest kind. The Presidente might have admitted that her "little girl" was subject to epileptic fits. The President, thinking that Cecile ought not to be present, signed to her to go. She went. Still Brunner said nothing. They all began to look at one another. The situation ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... comprehended in 'Know then, 'twas—I.' 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 ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... door being hurriedly unbarred, the "case" is handed out by his terrified companions, who are only too glad to be rid of him. To all appearances he is in a true epileptic state. In the light of the lantern, held conveniently near by one of the gangsmen, who have by this time turned out in various stages of undress, his features are seen to be strongly convulsed. His breathing is laboured and noisy, his ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... crescent on the court were occupied by lady-boarders not suffering from mental alienation or any loss of faculty, but from decayed fortunes. The deaf and dumb, the blind, the crippled, epileptic, and insane had separate dwellings built apart in the formal luxuriant gardens. "We have patients of all nations," said the sister. "Strangers see none of these; there have been distressing recognitions." Bessie was not desirous of seeing ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... that an epileptic tendency artificially produced by mutilating the nervous system of a guinea-pig is occasionally inherited may be a fact of "considerable weight," or on the other hand it may be entirely irrelevant. Cases ...
— Are the Effects of Use and Disuse Inherited? - An Examination of the View Held by Spencer and Darwin • William Platt Ball
... Tom's soul is put in mind of its foul bestial prison. After any too prolonged effort, such as those I have alluded to, his whole bodily frame gives way, and a complete exhaustion of the brain follows, accompanied with epileptic spasms. The trial at the White House, mentioned before, was successful, but was followed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... 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
... Trephining.—In the 17th No. of the New-York Medical and Physical Journal, Dr. DAVID L. ROGERS relates an interesting case of a man, aged 46, who had been subject to epileptic convulsions for 14 years, and who, of late years, had been unable to labour, and rapidly sinking into a state of idiocy, from ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... Topolski alone has a talent, but what does he do with it? . . . A bandit, a Singalese, who goes into epileptic fits on the stage, who is ready to put a barn on the stage if those new authors require it. They call that realism, while in truth it is nothing but roguery! . ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... hunching their backs up, like six cankerworms; 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 out ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... 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 son of a father ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... immigration to this country to persons who propose to become citizens of this country, and we can well afford to insist upon adequate scrutiny of the character of those who are thus proposed for future citizenship. There should be an increase in the stringency of the laws to keep out insane, idiotic, epileptic, and pauper immigrants. But this is by no means enough. Not merely the Anarchist, but every man of Anarchistic tendencies, all violent and disorderly people, all people of bad character, the incompetent, the lazy, the vicious, the physically unfit, defective, or degenerate should be kept out. ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... eastern Church; he maintained heretics in the sees of Alexandria and Antioch. After this he died in 491, and the last fact recorded of him is that the empress Ariadne, the daughter of Leo I., who had brought him the empire with her hand, when he fell into an epileptic fit and was supposed to be dead, had him buried at once, and placed guards around his tomb, who were forbidden to allow any approach to it. When the imperial vault was afterwards entered, Zeno was found to have torn his arm with his teeth. The ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... disorder, sexual acts performed on children appear as symptoms of moral and intellectual degeneration. In this connexion may be mentioned, congenital imbecility, progressive paralysis (paralytic dementia), senile dementia, chronic alcoholism, cerebral syphilis, and post-epileptic dementia; with or without these conditions, epileptic disturbances of consciousness may lead to sexual ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... 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 ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... and sound. From reverses of fortune, he became discouraged and intemperate for some years, having in this period four children, two of whom we had now received into the asylum; a third one was idiotic, and the fourth epileptic. He then reformed in habits, had three more children, all now grown to maturity, and to this period remaining sound and healthy." Another similar case follows. An intemperate parent had four children, two of whom became insane, one was an idiot, and the fourth died young, in "fits." Four children ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... who were 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 ...
— S.O.S. Stand to! • Reginald Grant
... Mrs. F——, AEt. 53. In August last was suddenly seized with epileptic fits, which continued to recur at uncertain intervals. Her belly had long been larger than natural, but without any perceptible fluctuation. Her legs and thighs swelled very considerably the beginning of this month, ...
— An Account of the Foxglove and some of its Medical Uses - With Practical Remarks on Dropsy and Other Diseases • William Withering
... the hunchbacked lover watches the execution of his mistress from the tower of Notre-Dame; and its strength passes gradually away into the anatomical preparations, for the general market, of novels like "Poor Miss Finch," in which the heroine is blind, the hero epileptic, and the obnoxious brother is found dead with his hands dropped off, in ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin |
