RT Book, Section
A1 Cardon, Aaron L.
A2 Kline, Mark W.
SR Print(0)
ID 1182923260
T1 Seizures and Epilepsy: Epidemiology and Seizure Classification
T2 Rudolph's Pediatrics, 23e
YR 2018
FD 2018
PB McGraw-Hill Education
PP New York, NY
SN 9781259588594
LK accesspediatrics.mhmedical.com/content.aspx?aid=1182923260
RD 2024/04/19
AB The  earliest  known  description  of  epilepsy  is  from  a  Mesopotamian  text  from  around  2000  BCE;  it  describes  a  patient  with  focal  head  deviation,  loss  of  consciousness,  and  frothing  at  the  mouth,  and  the  prescription  appears  to  have  been  exorcism.  A  neurophysiologic,  rather  than  divine,  underpinning  of  epilepsy  was  proposed  and  discussed  extensively  by  Hippocrates  in  400  BCE,  although  the  Indian  author  Atreya  may  have  speculated  a  similar  cause  nearly  200  years  prior.  However,  despite  Hippocrates’  renown  and  thorough  treatise  on  the  topic,  and  perhaps  due  to  its  dramatic  manifestations  and  behavioral  associations,  the  “sacred  disease”  remained  one  of  the  last  to  succumb  to  the  rationality  of  the  Enlightenment,  with  consensus  in  the  medical  community  accepting  its  natural  pathophysiology  only  late  in  the  18th  century.