GREEK BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE 



epilepsy, which commonly was regarded as a 

 stroke or visitation of a god or demon. But, 

 says the writer, " it appears to me to be nowise 

 more divine nor more sacred than other dis- 

 -,-yi eases, but has a natural cause from which it 

 originates like other affections. Men regard its 

 nature and cause as divine from ignorance and 

 wonder, because it is not at all like to other 

 diseases. And this notion of its divinity is kept 

 up by their inability to comprehend it, and the 

 simplicity of the mode by which it is treated, 

 for men are freed from it by purifications and 

 incantations. But if it is reckoned divine be- 

 cause it is wonderful, instead of one there are 

 many diseases which would be sacred; for, as 

 I will show, there are others no less wonderful 

 and prodigious, which nobody imagines to be 

 sacred. The quotidian, tertian and quartan 

 fevers seem to me no less sacred and divine in 

 their origin than this disease, though they are 

 not reckoned so wonderful. And I see men be- 

 come mad and demented from no manifest 

 cause. . . . They who first referred this disease 

 [epilepsy] to the gods, appear to me to have 

 been just such persons as the conjurers, purifi- 

 cators, mountebanks, and charlatans now are, 

 who give themselves out for being excessively 



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