EPILEPTIC BIG IX OF IS L AMIS M. 



tinned as to the ground of his belief, he generally says that it has been 

 revealed to bini, and that he feels that it is true, pointing with his 

 finger to his epigastrium. 



After describing a variety of cases of trances, visions, and religions 

 delusions, occurring in the epileptic, Dr. Howden remarks that t!. 

 and like cases naturally suggest the inquiry as to how far epilepsy has 

 had to do with the origin of certain religious creeds, and how far the 

 visions of the many so-called religious impostors may have had an 

 epileptic origin. 



' There is evidence that many religious fanatics were epileptics or 

 cataleptics. Ileeker, describing the dancing mania of the fourteenth 

 centurv, says : ' "While dancing, they neither saw nor heard, being in- 

 sensible to external impressions through the senses, but were haunted 

 by visions, their fancies conjuring up spirits, whose names they shrieked 

 out. . . . Others, during the paroxysm, saw the heavens open, and the 

 Saviour enthroned with the Virgin Mary, according as the religious 

 notions of the a^e were stran^elv and variously reflected in their ima- 

 ginations. "Where the 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 springiug up, began their dance amid strange 

 contortions.' 



M Aun Lee, the mother of the Shakers, is described as ' a wild creat- 

 ure from birth, a prey to hysteria and convulsions, violent in her con- 

 duct, ambitious of notice, and devoured by the lust of power.' "While 

 in the prison at Manchester a light shone upon her, and the Lord Jesus 

 stood before her in the ceil, and became one with her in form and sjurit. 

 A writer >avs : ' A combination of bodily disease perhaps catalepsy 

 and religious excitement appears to have produced in her the most 

 distressiu" - consequences. During the spasms and convulsions into 

 which she occasionally was thrown, her person was dreadfully distort- 

 ed, and she would clinch her hands until the blood oozed through the 

 pores of her skin. She continued so long in these fits that her flesh 

 and strength wasted away, and she required to be fed, and was nursed 

 like an infant.' " 



There is strong evidence that Mohammed was an epileptic, and 

 that, though a man of undoubted power and strong religious feeling, 

 he founded his pretensions as a medium of revelation on visions which 

 appeared to him during epileptic trances. Washington Irving, in his 

 " Life of Mohammed,"' says : 



Dr. Gustav "Weil, in a note to 'Mahommed der Prophet,' dis- 

 cusses the question of Mohammed's being subject to attacks of epi- 

 lepsv, which has generally been represented as a slander of his enem a 

 and oi Christian writers. It appears, however, to have been asserted 

 bv some of the oldest Moslem biographers, and given on the authority 

 of persons about him. He would be seized, they said, with violent 



