132 MARRIAGE AND DISEASE. 



assaults upon any one within his reach, and not a few 

 slay relatives near and dear to them, or destroy their 

 own lives, during such attacks. These outbursts may 

 occur at any time or place. 'they may even appear 

 before the intellect has been sufficiently weakened or 

 disordered to attract attention, and for this reason no 

 one who has ever been epileptic should be entrusted 

 with the care of children, or put in any other position 

 where opportunity is offered for the gratification of 

 such homicidal impulse. The intellectual course of 

 the epileptic between the fits whether physical or 

 mental is always a downward one. Each attack 

 leaves the whole mental apparatus more or less clouded 

 and exhausted, and as this is never wholly recovered 

 from, each attack marks a permanent impairment of 

 mind a step on the darkening path which leads 

 down to intellectual death. In certain cases the 

 maniacal attacks rarely appear, and the course of the 

 disease is marked only by the convulsive seizures. 

 But in these cases the result is the same. If life be 

 sufficiently prolonged, the same dark destination is 

 reached, whether the downward journey be a gradual 

 descent, or be accomplished by a series of bounds, each 

 marked by an outburst of murderous frenzy. In either 

 case the goal is a degraded imbecility. 



Epileptics are also specially liable to mental dis- 

 orders of the more ordinary character, that is, mental 

 disorder which continues in the intervals between the 

 fits. They frequently, at an early period, suffer from 

 auditory and visual hallucinations, and such cases are 



