A FIRST STUDY OF INHERITANCE OF EPILEPSY 



By Charles B. Davenport and David F. Weeks, M.D., 



I. Statement of the Problem 



Epilepsy is employed in this paper in a wide sense to include 

 not only cases of well-marked convulsions, but also cases in which 

 there has been only momentary loss of consciousness. Other, 

 physically less marked cases of epilepsy and various epileptiform 

 and border-line cases have undoubtedly been frequently over- 

 looked in the necessarily somewhat hurried investigations into 

 the pedigrees of patients. Given epilepsy as thus defined our 

 problem is: what laws, if any, are followed in its occurrence in 

 successive generations? How often does it arise de novo in a 

 strain showing elsewhere no mental weakness? What relation 

 does it bear to alcoholism, to paralysis, to migraine and to other 

 symptoms of lack of neural strength ? The answer to these ques- 

 tions can be reached only by a study of the pedigrees of families 

 containing epileptics in which the psychic history of numerous 

 members is precisely known. 



2. The Material and the Method of Collecting It 



This study is based on a lot of pedigrees of inmates of the 

 New Jersey State Village for Epileptics at Skillman, N. J. The 

 method by which they were obtained is important, for we 

 are convinced that any advance we have been able to make 

 in the difficult subject of inheritance of epilepsy is largely 



