"Epileptic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... had chanced to get her job. She had taken the place of an Irishwoman who had been working in that factory ever since any one could remember. For over fifteen years, so she declared. Mary Dennis was her name, and a long time ago she had been seduced, and had a little boy; he was a cripple, and an epileptic, but still he was all that she had in the world to love, and they had lived in a little room alone somewhere back of Halsted Street, where the Irish were. Mary had had consumption, and all day long you might hear her coughing as she ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... Vall was afraid the fellow would have an apoplectic stroke, or an epileptic fit. Mastering himself, however, he ...
— Last Enemy • Henry Beam Piper
... outward bulge of the head above the collar at the back. Abimelech Johns was a tin-miner who had spent his days in profane swearing and coursing after hares with greyhounds until the Lord had thrown him into a trance like that which overtook Saul of Tarsus, and not unlike an epileptic fit Abimelech himself had had in childhood. Since the trance he was a changed man; his passion for souls was now as great as his passion for pleasure had been before, and he had a name for working himself and his congregations up to a higher pitch than any one who ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... the razor on his leg Waiting until the shriek subsides. The epileptic on the bed Curves ...
— Poems • T. S. [Thomas Stearns] Eliot
... was only able to find epilepsy mentioned twice, and in both cases incorrectly, for the National Biographer had attributed it to Lord Herbert of Cherbury through misreading a passage in Herbert's Autobiography, while the epileptic fits of Sir W.R. Hamilton in old age were most certainly not true epilepsy. Without doubt, no eugenist could recommend an epileptic to become a parent. But if epilepsy has no existence in British men of genius it is improbable that it has often occurred among their parents. The loss to British ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... it lasted until midnight. For fourteen hours the old people did not leave the table. The grave-digger did the cooking, and did it very well. He was celebrated for this, and he would leave his fire to come in and dance and sing before and after every course. And yet this poor Father Bontemps was epileptic. Who would have thought it? He was fresh and strong, and merry as a young man. One day we found him in a ditch, struck down by his malady at nightfall. We carried him home with us, in a wheelbarrow, and we spent all night in caring for him. Three days afterward, ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... upward, while its back was curved like a saddle. I was afraid it might be hydrophobia or some other infectious sickness, and shot it on the spot. Perhaps I was rather too hasty; we can scarcely have any infection among us now. But what could it have been? Was it an epileptic attack? The other day one of the other puppies alarmed me by running round and round in the chart-house as if it were mad, hiding itself after a time between a chest and the wall. Some of the others, too, had seen it do the same thing; but after a while it got all right ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... Often hereditary peculiarities will show themselves in the third and fourth generation. It is no uncommon thing to see the grandmother's red hair reappear in her granddaughter, though her own child's hair was as black as a raven's wing. A crooked toe, a wart, a malformation, an epileptic tendency, a swart or fair complexion, may disappear in all the children of a family, and show itself again in the grand-or great-grandchildren. Mental and moral conditions reappear in like manner. In medical literature we have many curious illustrations of this law ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur
... on the ground, he asked his father how long it was ago since this had come unto him and the father replied that it was since he was & child. And Jesus said unto him: "If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth" (ver. 23). And then the father of the epileptic or demoniac uttered these pregnant and immortal words: "Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief!"—Pisteyo, kyrie, boethei te ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... of months. I even arranged with a younger brother to set out at once for some quiet place in the White Mountains, where I hoped to steady my shattered nerves. At this time I felt as though in a tremor from head to foot, and the thought that I was about to have an epileptic attack constantly recurred. On more than one occasion I said to friends that I would rather die than live an epileptic; yet, if I rightly remember, I never declared the actual fear that I was doomed to bear such an affliction. Though I held the mad belief that I should suffer epilepsy, ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... Crabbe is bowing down under epileptic fits, or something like, and I believe his brave old white head will soon sink into the village Churchsward. Why, OUR time seems coming. Make way, Gentlemen!—Yours ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... numbing silence fell. A swish! A cat on a small bear's back. A scene impossible! A hairy tornado, rolling, twisting, flopping, yelling, screeching, roaring, and howling, tore, bit, scratched, clawed, and walloped all over the place. An epileptic nebula; a maelstrom that revolved in every way known to man at the same instant; a prodigy of tooth and claw. If that fight were magnified a hundred times, a glimpse of it would kill; as it was, myself and the clothing store boy clung ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips
... state, sometimes in a state of madness. Never knowing what may happen to them, never knowing what they may do to others. Always suffering, always hopeless! Treated as criminals till their deeds are fatal, then certified to be "criminal lunatics." Such is the life of the underworld epileptic. Life, did I call it?—let me withdraw that word; it is the awful, protracted agony of a living death, in which sanity struggles with madness, rending and wounding a poor human frame. Happy are they when they die young! but even epileptics live on and on; but ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... course supplies instruction concerning the management and protective care of common emergencies. The instruction is practical and rational. It covers such emergencies as: sprains, fractures, dislocations, wounds, bruises, sudden pain, fainting, epileptic attacks, unconsciousness, drowning, electric shock, and ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... purity of nature or principles of conduct to restrain him from vice, his dissipation could yet scarcely be called dissipation, so little did it wake up this lethargic, ailing, restless nature. Despite the furious passion which he had for horses, and the hysterical, one might almost say epileptic passions which he experienced for women, he remained characterless, chaotic, only half alive. His many journeys gave him only the negative pleasure of getting away from already known places, the negative wisdom ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... Sir Richard and Lady Burton went about their usual business, and were amused at seeing the terrified people rush off to the railway-station, and the queer garments in which they were clad. Shortly after Lady Burton was terribly frightened from another cause. Her husband had an epileptic fit, and it was some time before she and the doctors could bring him round again. Henceforth it became necessary for them to have always with them a resident doctor. They both of them disliked the idea of having a stranger spying ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... children and others afflicted with the epilepsy, who cannot take medicines, let the following experiment be tried, which I have found to be effectual, whether the patient was a demoniac, a lunatic, or an epileptic. When the patient and his parents have fasted three days, let them conduct him to church. If he be of a proper age, and of his right senses, let him confess. Then let him hear Mass on Friday, and also on Saturday. On Sunday let a good and religious ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... had spoken hesitantly and cautiously. Now like the epileptic or the mad dog, he burst into a volcanic outpouring in which wild words tumbled upon themselves in a cataract of boiling abandon. His fists were clenched and veins stood out ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... law in the married state does not produce in the husband any very serious disorder. Debility, aches, cramps, and a tendency to epileptic seizures, are sometimes seen as the effects of great excess. An evil of no small account is the steady growth of the sexual passion by habitual unrestraint. It is in this way that what is known as libidinous blood is nursed as well among those who are strictly virtuous, in ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... against tramps and vagrants. Constitutional amendments proposing women's suffrage were defeated this year (1895) in no less than nine States. Connecticut passed a law that no man or woman should marry who was epileptic or imbecile, if the wife be under forty-five, and another State for the first time awards divorce to the husband for cruelty or indignities suffered at the hands of the wife, while another State still repeals altogether its law permitting divorces for cruelty or intoxication. ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... I was possessed of a Jinn, the common Eastern explanation of an epileptic fit long before the days of the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... tenants, and would order Gaffer Jones to be converted, as she would order Goody Hicks to take a James's powder, without appeal, resistance, or benefit of clergy. My Lord Southdown, her late husband, an epileptic and simple-minded nobleman, was in the habit of approving of everything which his Matilda did and thought. So that whatever changes her own belief might undergo (and it accommodated itself to a ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... and we may say, en passant, that the miracles were frequently performed in their favor. Whenever the monks made some solemn procession, promenading through the streets the relics of some saint, it was not uncommon to see a franc-mitou, paralyzed, crippled or epileptic, endeavoring to touch the sacred casket; in vain would the attempt be made to keep him at a distance; he redoubled his efforts, and scarcely had he succeeded in gluing his lips to the sacred coffer when immediately the cripple threw away his crutch, the epileptic ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... entered Bethany. The painful emotion felt by Jesus at the grave of the friend whom he believed to be dead (John xi. 33, 38) might be taken by those present for the agitation and tremors which were wont to accompany miracles. According to popular belief, divine power in a man was like an epileptic and convulsive element. Continuing the above hypothesis, Jesus wished to see once more the man he had loved, and the stone having been rolled away, Lazarus came forth in his grave-clothes, his head bound with a napkin. This apparition naturally was looked upon by every one as a resurrection. ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... use of alcoholic liquors are prominent predisposing causes. Many of the causes treated by us have been brought on by masturbation. Others are the results of injury to the head. Often fracture of the skull is followed by epileptic attacks. ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... Epileptic attacks are of every degree of violence, varying from a moment's unconsciousness, from which the patient recovers so quickly that he cannot be convinced he has been ill, to that awful state which terrifies every beholder, and seems to ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... are doubtless due to anemia of the medulla, because of the infrequent ventricular contractions. This anemia of the medulla and of the brain may also cause an epileptic seizure, or a partial paralytic seizure without any apparent paralysis. It is probable, however, that in these cases there may be coincident arterial disease in the brain. These sudden syncopal attacks are likely to occur when a patient suddenly ...
— DISTURBANCES OF THE HEART • OLIVER T. OSBORNE, A.M., M.D.
... shout of laughter, but slowly Margot Poins fell across the Queen's knees. She uttered no sound, but lay there motionless. The sight affected Udal to an epileptic fury. ...
— The Fifth Queen Crowned • Ford Madox Ford
... a story of an "amiable and intelligent" grimalkin, which belonged to a young girl who was subject to epileptic fits. Puss, by dint of repeated observation, knew when they were coming on, and would run, frisking her tail, to the girl's parents, mewing in the most heart-breaking tones, and clawing at their legs, till she made them follow her. Her ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 401, November 28, 1829 • Various
... slender like the women-saints of the Church. The poor feeding of those days must needs make women fine-bred, but lacking also in vital strength. The children die off in vast numbers: those pale roses are all nerves. Hence, will presently burst forth the epileptic dances of the fourteenth century. Meanwhile, towards the twelfth century, there come to be two weaknesses attached to this state of half-grown youth: by night somnambulism; in the daytime seeing of visions, trance, ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... thunder and the wind. The Devil too raged openly upon the earth; he skulked behind the hedge-rows in the gloaming; he laughed loudly in the night-time; he clawed the dying sinner, pounced on the unbaptized babe, and twisted the limbs of the epileptic. A foul fiend slunk ever by a man's side and whispered villainies in his ear, while above him there hovered an angel of grace who pointed to the steep and narrow track. How could one doubt these things, when Pope and priest and scholar and King were all united in believing them, with no single ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... weakened by the exile of the most sober and industrious of her population, the Jews; drawn into a foreign policy for which she had neither the means nor the inclination; instituting at home an economic policy which was almost epileptic in its consequences, she found her strength dissipated, and gradually sank into a condition ...
— The Buccaneers in the West Indies in the XVII Century • Clarence Henry Haring
... is not uncommon, especially with epileptic patients. Every mad-doctor knows cases in which there are what may be described as alternating consciousnesses with alternating memories. But the experiments of the French hypnotists carry us much further. In their hands this Sub-conscious Personality is capable of ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead
... continued, induces variety of convulsions or fixed spasms either of the affected organ or of the moving fibres in the other parts of the body. In respect to the spectra in the eye, this is well illustrated in No. 7 and 8, of Sect. XL. Epileptic convulsions, as the emprosthotonos and opisthotonos, with the cramp of the calf of the leg, locked jaw, and other cataleptic fits, appear to originate from pain, as some of these patients scream aloud before the convulsion takes place; which seems at first to be an effort to ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... in turn redouble their efforts; they are purple in the face and glistening with perspiration. Defeat, they know, is before them, for the orchestra has the greater staying power! The flutes bleat; the trombones grunt; the fiddles squeal; an epileptic leader cuts wildly into the air about him. When, finally, their strength exhausted, the breathless human beings, with one last ear-piercing note, give up the struggle and retire, the public, excited by the unequal contest, bursts ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... movement spread, and, directly after, a passage even in that dense mass of people was cleared for two men, who bore forwards Prudence Hickson, lying rigid as a log of wood, in the convulsive position of one who suffered from an epileptic fit. They laid her down among the ministers who were gathered round the pulpit. Her mother came to her, sending up a wailing cry at the sight of her distorted child. Dr. Mather came down from the pulpit and stood over her, exorcising ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... epilepsy also in animals born of parents having been rendered epileptic by the section ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... that is to say, the people, traversed by revolutionary currents, trembled under them with indescribably vague epileptic shocks. These dreamers, some isolated, others united in families and almost in communion, turned over social questions in a pacific but profound manner; impassive miners, who tranquilly pushed their galleries into the depths of a volcano, hardly ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... themselves in a horizontal line eight yards distant, all of them aiming toward her heart, she appeared to wake up. She shrieked, her eyes abnormally dilated by the horror of the reality that so soon was to take place. Her cheeks were covered with tears. She tugged at the ligatures with the vigor of an epileptic. ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... first public men to see Napoleon after his return from Waterloo was Lavallette. "I flew," says he, "to the Elysee to see the Emperor: he summoned me into his closet, and as soon as he saw me, he came to meet me with a frightful epileptic 'laugh. 'Oh, my God!' he said, raising his eyes to heaven, and walking two or three times up and down the room. This appearance of despair was however very short. He soon recovered his coolness, and asked me what was going forward in the ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... epileptic—died in a fit. I have seen the doctor's certificate. She was greatly worried over his death, and the manner of it, and ...
— While Caroline Was Growing • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... rather than a man of affectionate disposition welcoming home a family circle unexpectedly enlarged. The hoarse gurgle which escaped his lips might have gassed for a greeting, or it might have presaged an epileptic seizure. ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... inhibitions. He is fascinated by the loss of self-control—by the disturbance and excitement which this produces, often in the most respectable circles. He is beyond all his rivals the novelist of "scenes." His characters get drunk, or go mad with jealousy, or fall in epileptic fits, or rave hysterically. If Dostoevsky had had less vision he would have been Strindberg. If his vision had been aesthetic and sensual, he ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... attitude and strange apparel! And then to go within, to announce yourself as an intending purchaser, and, closely watched, be suffered to undo those bundles and breathlessly devour those pages of gesticulating villains, epileptic combats, bosky forests, palaces and war-ships, frowning fortresses and prison vaults - it was a giddy joy. That shop, which was dark and smelt of Bibles, was a loadstone rock for all that bore the name of boy. They could not pass it by, nor, having entered, ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... hear it said that a child that was conceived when the father was in an exhilarated condition is apt to be epileptic, or nervous, or insane, and what not. This is also to be taken with a grain of salt. A chronic alcoholic has a defective germ-plasm, and his children are apt to be defective. But a glass of wine at a wedding banquet cannot affect the previously formed spermatozoa. And the statements ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... implied that, unless these defects are relatively superficial, the scientific policy for treating these classes of defective individuals would be that of segregation in institutions. The feeble-minded, the chronic insane, the chronic epileptic, and other hopelessly defective persons, in other words, should be permanently kept in institutions where tender and humane care should be provided, but in such a way that they will not reproduce their kind and burden future generations. The policy of ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... factors even in public life are curiously illustrated by the story of the "Nun of Kent" —a story concluded by her execution about this time. The "Nun" was a young woman named Elizabeth Barton of humble birth, who was subject to fits or trances, presumably epileptic in character, in which trances she gave vent to utterances which were supposed to be inspired, being generally religious in their bearing. Having acquired some notoriety and a reputation for sanctity, her prophesyings before ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... would be the great triumph of "morals and medicine." The passion of avarice resembles the thirst of dropsical patients; that of envy is a slow wasting fever; love is often frenzy, and capricious and sudden restlessness, epileptic fits. There are moral disorders which at times spread like epidemical maladies through towns, and countries, and even nations. There are hereditary vices and infirmities transmitted from the parent's ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... last, meant as preservatives against unseen malarias or contagions, possible or impossible. He assists every month with his children at the mysteries of the Orphic priests; and finally, whenever he sees an epileptic patient, he spits in his own bosom to avert ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... fits, some of a very serious nature. Lying in bed, my leg encased in its plaster-of-paris cast, about ten o'clock one night, when just dozing off, I was frightened into wakefulness by a scream. A man, who turned out to be an escaped epileptic, was standing in the doorway screaming, his eyes bulging out of his head. He had escaped by striking the sentry over the head with the fire brazier, used to keep the sentry warm. Staring wildly about the room for a couple of seconds, he made a leap ...
— S.O.S. Stand to! • Reginald Grant
... suffered this for eighteen years, "had," says the evangelist, "a spirit of infirmity;" and Jesus Christ, after having healed her, says "that Satan held her bound for eighteen years;" and in another place, it is said that a lunatic or epileptic person was possessed by the demon. It is clear, from what is said by St. Matthew and St. Luke,[431] that he was attacked by epilepsy. The Saviour cured him of this evil malady, and by that means took from the demon the opportunity of tormenting ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... people. It does not apply to this part of Italy. As I approached the danger spot I saw rows of large, fat gentlemen with long thin black cigars leaning against walls in the sunshine. The general atmosphere would have steadied an epileptic. Italy is perfectly sure of herself in this quarter. Finally, after a long drive of winding gradients, always beside the Adige, we reached Ala, where we interviewed the Commander of the Sector, a man who has done splendid work during the recent fighting. ...
— A Visit to Three Fronts • Arthur Conan Doyle
... strong, wise and crafty contemporary and ancestor brought into the world the "old man-cult," ancestor- worship, gods and goddesses of ranging degrees and power, but very much like men and women except for power and longevity. Certain natural phenomena—death, sleep, trance, epileptic attack—all played their part, bringing about ideas of the soul, immortality, possession, etc. With culture and the growth of inhibition and knowledge and the use of art and symbols, the primitive beliefs modified their nature; the gods became one God, who was gradually ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... form of following the path of least resistance) plays a prominent part. This same principle is also seen in such reactions as the repetition of the question or the senseless repetition of a former answer. These phenomena remind us of what we see in epileptic confusions, in epileptic deterioration and ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... for a while. There was something there, Dorn. Life, yes ... yes ... It was amazing. But here it is different. What is it the correspondents say? 'All is confusion, there is nothing to report.' ... Yes, confusion. There are at present three poets, one lunatic, an epileptic, four workingmen and a scientist from Vienna, and two school teachers. They are the Council of Ten. Look, there is Muhsam, the one with the red vandyke. A poet. He used to recite rhymes in ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... strength to refrain from manifesting by some glad hurrah, by some untimely effusion of gestures and speech, the impulse of physical gaiety which pervaded his whole being, as happens to those great mountain dogs that are thrown into epileptic fits of madness by the inhaling of a ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... the grave in the cold, looking fixedly at it, but making no active demonstration whatever. This went on for about six weeks, and attracted a good deal of curiosity in the neighborhood. At length, in the latter part of February, Archibald had a sort of fit, apparently of an epileptic nature. On recovering from it, he called for a glass of milk, and drank it with avidity; he then fell asleep, and did not awake ...
— Archibald Malmaison • Julian Hawthorne
... were unloading the asses, John Walters, one of the soldiers, fell down in an epileptic fit, and expired in about an hour after. The Negroes belonging to our guide set about digging a well, having first lighted a fire to keep off the bees, which were swarming about the place in search of water. In ...
— The Journal Of A Mission To The Interior Of Africa, In The Year 1805 • Mungo Park
... public has never heard of him—can very easily answer their accusers: 'What,' they may cry, 'are we to investigate? It is absurd to ask us to leave our special studies, and sit for many hours, through many years, probably in the dark, with an epileptic person, and a few hysterical believers. We are not conjurers or judges of conjuring.' Again, is a man like Professor Huxley, or Lord Kelvin, to run about the country, examining every cottage where there are rumours of curious noises, and where stones and other missiles ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... roots of a tree which grew midway up the rock. Here they found a footing for the whole party, which was, of course, small in number. In scaling the second precipice, however, one of the party was seized with an epileptic fit, to which he was subject, brought on, perhaps, by terror in the act of climbing the ladder. He could neither ascend nor descend; moreover, if they had thrown him down, apart from the cruelty of the thing, the fall of his body might have alarmed ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... the 9th of May, 1865, that Hamilton was in Dublin for the last time. A few days later he had a violent attack of gout, and on the 4th of June he became alarmingly ill, and on the next day had an attack of epileptic convulsions. However, he slightly rallied, so that before the end of the month he was again at work at the "Elements." A gratifying incident brightened some of the last days of his life. The National Academy of Science in ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... produce physical manifestations is frequently drawn from the sitters as well as from the medium, and the eventual effect on the latter is invariably evil, as is evinced by the large number of such sensitives who have gone either morally or psychically to the bad—some becoming epileptic, some taking to drink, others falling under influences which induced them to stoop to fraud and ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... untamable core that gives the point and the splendid audacity to French literature and art,—its vehemence and impatience of restraint. It is the salt of their speech, the nitre of their wit. When morbid, it gives that rabid and epileptic tendency which sometimes shows itself in Victor Hugo. In this great writer, however, it more frequently takes the form of an aboriginal fierceness and hunger that glares and bristles, and is ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... license. The applicants are required to answer the usual questions in regard to age, parentage, residence, etc., and are then required to swear that their previous statements have been correct and that neither of them is "epileptic, imbecile or insane," that they are "not nearer of kin than second cousins, and not at the time under the influence of any intoxicating liquor or narcotic drug." Undoubtedly violations of the consanguinity clause are very frequent, and it is likewise easily ...
— Consanguineous Marriages in the American Population • George B. Louis Arner
... of Willis's career afford a melancholy contrast to its brilliant opening. Health, success, prosperity—all had deserted him, and nothing remained but the editorial chair, to which he clung even after epileptic attacks had resulted in paralysis and gradual softening of the brain. The failure of his mental powers was kept secret as long as possible, but in November, 1866, he yielded to the entreaties of his wife and children, knocked off work ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... Epileptic attacks and other forms of convulsions are suppressed, but never cured, by bromides which benumb and paralyze the brain and nerve centers. All that these sedatives accomplish is to produce in ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... never cared for this picture; it was too complicated and ingenious—it needed too much co-operation from the observer's mind. Besides, I had never seen a boy with anything approaching the muscular development of the epileptic youth in the centre. The thing in the picture that I most approved of was the end of the log in the little pool, in the foreground; it ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... this extraordinary creature became convulsed, and she fell to the ground foaming in an epileptic fit, and was carried into ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... Then I shouldn't have thought that you'd have—" but she dropped this line to take up another. "Yes, he's always been so. When he was a boy they were afraid he might be epileptic; and though he never was as bad as that he's always needed to be taken care of. He can do very wild and foolish things as—as you've ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... here is just beginning to get warm, and I of course to get better. There has been a good deal of nervous headache here this Ramadan. I had to attend the Kadee, and several more. My Turkish neighbour at Karnac has got a shaitan (devil), i.e. epileptic fits, and I was sent for to exorcise him, which I am endeavouring to do with nitrate of silver, etc.; but I fear imagination will kill him, so I advise him to go to Cairo, and leave the devil-haunted house. I have this minute killed the first snake of this year—a ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... divining rod to find the proper place to dig wells. He taught his son crystal gazing and the use of the "peepstone" to discover hidden treasure. Young Joseph was good-natured and lazy. Early in life he began to have visions which were accompanied by epileptic "seizures." One night in 1823, according to his story, the angel Moroni appeared to him three times, and told him that the Bible of the western continent, the supplement to the New Testament, was buried on a hill called ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous
... been said that he was subject to epileptic attacks after his first campaign in Italy. Bourrienne was with him eleven years, and never saw him suffer from ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... the sister, sinking down on the floor, striking the wood with her forehead fanatically, twisting herself about and quivering like a person in an epileptic ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... sat down to write another letter to Herr Sesemann, stating that these unaccountable things that were going on in the house had so affected his daughter's delicate constitution that the worst consequences might be expected. Epileptic fits and St. Vitus's dance often came on suddenly in cases like this, and Clara was liable to be attacked by either if the cause of the general ...
— Heidi • Johanna Spyri
... glimpse of him," said Mr. Vertrees. "I wouldn't know him if I saw him, but your impression of him is—" He broke off suddenly, springing to his feet in agitation. "I can't imagine her—oh, NO!" he gasped. And he began to pace the floor. "A half-witted epileptic!" ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... when it dawned on him that the rump of an officer and nobleman had been bust in by the hobnailed socks of a poor private! He went off chattering like a woman and wriggling like an epileptic—" ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... is owing to any organic affection of the brain or the cranium. But in this opinion there is some inconsistency. For he soon after states that in thirty-six dissections he found nothing more remarkable than in the brain of apoplectic and epileptic patients, or of persons who died from furor or convulsions. Now, this is a confession that some deviations from the natural and healthy appearances were observed; and this is all that is contended for, and all that the present limited state of our ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... would sometimes preach before such Unitarian congregations, within walking distance, as cared to hear him. But as he would take no pay for his services his preaching contributed nothing toward the support of his family. Lloyd, who was epileptic and subject to moody variation in his attachments, was but an irregular housemate after the first few months, and his contribution to the household expenses was correspondingly uncertain. The future looked ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Constantinople to be the ruler of the eastern Church; he maintained heretics in the sees of Alexandria and Antioch. After this he died in 491, and the last fact recorded of him is that the empress Ariadne, the daughter of Leo I., who had brought him the empire with her hand, when he fell into an epileptic fit and was supposed to be dead, had him buried at once, and placed guards around his tomb, who were forbidden to allow any approach to it. When the imperial vault was afterwards entered, Zeno was found to have torn his arm with his teeth. The empress ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... Grandville tried the common means of holding out hopes of commutation of the sentence in case of confession; but when he went to see the prisoner and suggest it the latter received him with such furious cries and epileptic contortions, such rage at being powerless to take him by the throat, that ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... Tommy was having a bad attack of epileptic fits for a moment, till it transpired that he had flumped down on a dead Boche in endeavouring to escape the searching glare of the flare. After the thing had burnt its giddy self out Tommy crawled crab-fashion over into the providential cutting in which ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... certain bodies; at least, they seem strange to those unacquainted with psychometry and the literature of the past century relating to this subject. Two physicians in Rochefort, Professors Bourru and Burot, in treating a hystero-epileptic person, found that gold, even when at a distance of fifteen centimeters, produced in him a feeling of unbearable heat. They continued these experiments with great care, and, after a number of trials, came to this ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 613, October 1, 1887 • Various
... State has already recognised its public obligation to provide remedial aid in its provision for the education and lodging of the blind, the deaf and the dumb, and in the measures taken within recent years for the special education of the defective and the epileptic. The provision for these purposes may indeed be justified on the grounds that the expense of the education of children of the industrial classes so afflicted is beyond the powers of any one individual, ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... in the foam of a beer sign, apparently elaborated with a whitewash brush and finished in the throes of an epileptic fit, solicited a share of ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... inspiration or possession is commonly invoked to explain all abnormal mental states, particularly insanity or conditions of mind bordering on it, so that persons more or less crazed in their wits, and particularly hysterical or epileptic patients, are for that very reason thought to be peculiarly favoured by the spirits and are therefore consulted as oracles, their wild and whirling words passing for the revelations of a higher power, whether a god or a ghost, who considerately ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... saints separated, but, shortly after, met again at Bologna. Francis going to Bologna, met a woman whose son was epileptic, and who came to beg the aid of his prayers. He wrote on a slip of paper some short but very devout ejaculatory prayers which he thought might be taken to the sick youth; they had no sooner been given to him, ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... just gone into the women's workroom. One of the sewing gang is epileptic, and fell in a fit a few minutes ago, so I sent for her. Come this way and ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... where the human interest is still thin and sparse. It is valuable in itself, and it produces an occasional detached sensation. There was the case, in Dr Drummond's church, of placid-faced, saintly old Sandy MacQuhot, the epileptic. It used to be a common regret with Lorne Murchison that as sure as he was allowed to stay away from church Sandy would have a fit. That was his little boy's honesty; the elders enjoyed the ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... is a very curious thing," he said in a voice unnecessarily loud. "I've seen it take hold of men of proved courage and paralyse them. It's just like an epileptic fit—beyond a man's control. I've known a fellow—the most reckless, hare-brained daredevil you can imagine—to stand petrified with fear on the bank of a river, and let a wounded comrade drown before his eyes. And he was a ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... nervous depression and strain, extreme weakness of the spine and oscillations of the hands when spread horizontally with the fingers and thumbs wide apart. This may in one way be accounted for by the difficulty that men have in obtaining wives, owing to the scarcity of women. Apoplectic and epileptic fits and convulsions were not of very frequent occurrence, but they seemed severe when they did occur. The fire cure was usually applied in order to drive away the spirits that were supposed to have entered the body, but, all the same, these ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... an impotent scream, and the man Pietro caught her in his arms. Quivering and convulsed, she writhed in an epileptic fit. ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... bluing, burnt cork, English mustard, Easter dyes and the yolks of a dozen eggs over himself, seasoning to taste with red peppers. Then he spread a large tarpaulin on the floor and lay down on it and had an epileptic fit, the result being a picture which he labeled Revolt, or Collision Between Two Heavenly Bodies, or Premature Explosion of a Custard Pie, or something else equally appropriate. The Futurists ought to make quite a number of converts in this country, especially ...
— Cobb's Bill-of-Fare • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... sank more and more, and he became subject to violent eruptions on the face and to bad epileptic fits, and his spirits sank every day. At last, as he was praying before the shrine of St. Edward at Westminster Abbey, he was seized with a terrible fit, and was carried into the Abbot's chamber, where he presently died. It had been foretold ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens
... the Juvenile Court, and Loulie Hill, a girl from the country who had once gone wrong, and who is now trying to keep straight on five dollars a week made in the sewing-room of one of the city's hospitals. Bettie Flynn, who lives at the City Home because of epileptic fits, also comes in occasionally. Bettie is a friend of Mrs. Mundy. Owing to kinlessness and inability to care for herself, owing, also, to there being nowhere else to which she could go, she has been forced to enter the Home. Her caustic comments ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... poems and plays there are the same unaccountable protervities that have already astonished us in the romances. There, too, is the same feverish strength, welding the fiery iron of his idea under forge-hammer repetitions—an emphasis that is somehow akin to weakness—a strength that is a little epileptic. He stands so far above all his contemporaries, and so incomparably excels them in richness, breadth, variety, and moral earnestness, that we almost feel as if he had a sort of right to fall oftener and more ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a fit of drunkenness, he struck his father. He married a tap-room girl from St. Austell, and beat her. She gave him two sons: the elder (named Nicholas, after his father), a gentle boy, very bony in limb, after the fashion of the Rosewarnes; the younger, Michael, an epileptic. His mother had been turned out of doors one night in a north-westerly gale, and had lain till morning in a cold pew of the disused chapel, whereby the child came to birth prematurely. This happened in 1771, the year that Nicholas ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... greatest changes in the world's history have been effected by dwellers in the borderlands. Mahomet was an epileptic, and his first vision was the result on an epileptic convulsion or seizure. The character of his visions was exactly like that of those visions which an epileptic sees and describes at the present time. Mahomet ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... certain Abib, the writer's master in the science of medicine. It is written from Bethany; and the "strange medical experience" of which it treats, is the case of Lazarus, whom Karshish has seen there. Lazarus, as he relates, has been the subject of a prolonged epileptic trance, and his reason impaired by a too sudden awakening from it. He labours under the fixed idea that he was raised from the dead; and that the Nazarene physician at whose command he rose (and who has since perished in a popular tumult) ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... the common soldier at this stage of the war would have thrown an ordinary quartermaster of latter day service into an epileptic fit, it was so ponderous in size and enormous in quantities—a perfect household outfit. A few days before this the soldier had received his first two months' pay, all in new crisp bank notes, fresh from the State banks or banks of deposit. It can be easily imagined that there were lively ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... of thinking of the weather first thing in the morning, and this little thing wrought a change in my view of him. His madness was seemingly like that of an epileptic, and when it passed he was a simple creature with ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... is a far-reaching independence between the apparent mental variations and the seriousness of the brain affection. Light hysteric states may produce a strong absenting of the mind while severe epileptic conditions of the brain may be accompanied by very slight mental changes. Every neurasthenic state may play havoc with mental life, while grave brain destructions may only shade slightly the character ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... but laughter. One of the young men even amused himself by incommoding me, as was then very easy; and that not from ill- nature, but mere clodlike incapacity to think, for he expected me to join the laugh. I did so, but it was phantom merriment. Later on, a man from Kansas had three violent epileptic fits, and though, of course, there were not wanting some to help him, it was rather superstitious terror than sympathy that his case evoked among his fellow-passengers. "Oh, I hope he's not going to die!" cried a woman; "it would be terrible to ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... above my head Begins irascibly to flare and fret, Wheezing into its epileptic jet, Reminding me I ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 - Edited by Sir Edward Howard Marsh • Various
... my little girl has been suffering from epileptic crises. Several doctors had told me that about the age of 14 or 15 they would disappear or become worse. Having heard of you, I sent her to you from the end of December till May. Now her cure is complete, for during six months she has ...
— Self Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion • Emile Coue
... renowned novel in which the hunchbacked lover watches the execution of his mistress from the tower of Notre-Dame; and its strength passes gradually away into the anatomical preparations, for the general market, of novels like "Poor Miss Finch," in which the heroine is blind, the hero epileptic, and the obnoxious brother is found dead with his hands dropped ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... importunate army of tramps. The mean number of such inmates in all the workhouses on any day is about 40,000, of whom about one-third are sick, one-third aged and infirm, one-seventh children, one-twentieth mothers of illegitimate children, and one-twelfth insane and epileptic. This awful confusion of infirmity and vice, this Purgatory perpetuating itself to the exclusion of all hope of Paradise, presents the vital problem ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... put as to the probability of fits terminating in epilepsy; or, on the other hand, as to the ground for hope in any case that epileptic attacks, which have already often recurred, will eventually cease. In the first place, no conclusion can safely be drawn from the severity of a convulsion, nor from its general character, as to the probability of its frequent recurrence, or of its passing into permanent ...
— The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases • Charles West, M.D.
... manner, I own, may be altered since I was present at the representation of that performance; but certain I am, when I beheld him in that critical conjuncture, his behaviour appeared to me so uncouth, that I really imagined he was visited by some epileptic distemper; for he stood tottering and gasping for the space of two minutes, like a man suddenly struck with the palsy; and, after various distortions and side-shakings, as if he had got fleas in his doublet, heaved ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... enabled him the other day to find bail, at a moment's notice, to the amount of L40,000. On the other hand, his enemies diagnose him after the manner of Lombroso, and find him to be a degenerate and an epileptic, ungovernably irritable, vain, mendacious, arrogant, sometimes quite irresponsible for his actions. A really strong man he can scarcely be; scarcely a man of true political insight, else he would not have tried to play the despot with no plausible ideal to allege in defense ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... friends, was capricious. His temper was often sullen, and when in one of his gloomy moods he would spend the whole evening in his farm kitchen in morose silence. This state of mind was in part due to physical infirmity. As a child he had been subject to epileptic fits, and though these grew less frequent as he advanced to manhood, he never entirely shook them off, and during his married life a long spell of gloomy misanthropy would sometimes end in the return of one of these attacks. He was, too, a proud man, and his pride bred in him a morbid ...
— More Tales of the Ridings • Frederic Moorman
... said, "didn't I call to you not to be alarmed? Mr. Silk, here, has been seized with a—a kind of epileptic fit. Help him downstairs and call a chair for him. Don't stare; he will not bite again for a very ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... that Rayder came upon the floor with a fat widow milliner. He had taken a few drinks of gin and was trying to act kittenish when, in the midst of a cotillion, the widow fell to the floor in an epileptic fit. They bore the woman to an adjoining room, where she soon recovered, but it was such a shock to Rayder's nerves that he went out and braced up ...
— Where Strongest Tide Winds Blew • Robert McReynolds
... transmitted the defect as far as the third generation." ("Heredity and Human Progress.") A murderer was the son of a drunkard; of three brothers, one was normal, one a drunkard, and the third was a criminal epileptic. Of his three paternal uncles, one was a murderer, one a half idiot, and one a violent character. Of his four cousins, sons of the latter, two were half idiots, one a complete idiot, and the other ...
— The Fertility of the Unfit • William Allan Chapple
... sing snatches of songs, sometimes in Welsh and sometimes in English, but with the strange, weird intonation of a person in a dream. I have known something like this to take place before, but it has been in seizures of an epileptic kind, very unlike this case in their general characteristics. The mental processes seem to have been completely arrested by the shock, as the wheels of a watch or a musical box are ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... healthy and vigorous. Upon the same account, the women did not bathe the new-born children with water, as is the custom in all other countries, but with wine, to prove the temper and complexion of their bodies; from a notion they had that epileptic and weakly children faint and waste away upon their being thus bathed, while, on the contrary, those of a strong and vigorous habit acquire firmness and get a temper by it like steel. There was much care and art, too, used by the nurses; they ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... enabled us to escape him. Buxhowden pursues us—we scuttle. He hardly crosses the river to our side before we recross to the other. At last our enemy. Buxhowden, catches us and attacks. Both generals are angry, and the result is a challenge on Buxhowden's part and an epileptic fit on Bennigsen's. But at the critical moment the courier who carried the news of our victory at Pultusk to Petersburg returns bringing our appointment as commander in chief, and our first foe, Buxhowden, is vanquished; we can now ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... talk of the accident. Mr. Cunningham said that he had once known a similar case. A man of seventy had bitten off a piece of his tongue during an epileptic fit and the tongue had filled in again, so that no one could see a ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... them all sooner or later. In Wentworth Street, amid dead cabbage-leaves, and mud, and refuse, and orts, and offal, stood the woe-begone Meckisch, offering his puny sponges, and wooing the charitable with grinning grimaces tempered by epileptic fits at judicious intervals. A few inches off, his wife in costly sealskin jacket, purchased salmon with a Maida Vale manner. Compressed in a corner was Shosshi Shmendrik, his coat-tails yellow with the yolks of dissolving eggs from a bag in his pocket. He asked her frantically, if she had ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... of my practice of homoeopathy I was called to see a young man recently attacked with "epileptic fits." As he was going immediately to New York, with his sister, I advised them to call on the late Dr. John F. Gray, with whom I became acquainted during my first visit to New York. On reaching New ...
— Personal Experience of a Physician • John Ellis
... quite old—twenty! Attention! This is the overture. It begins with an andante in C major, triple time. Do you hear the sadness of the ambitious man who is not satisfied with love? Then, through his lamentation, by a transition to the key of E flat, allegro, common time, we hear the cries of the epileptic lover, his fury and certain warlike phrases, for the mighty charms of the one and only woman give him the impulse to multiplied loves which strikes us in Don Giovanni. Now, as you hear these themes, do you not catch a ...
— Gambara • Honore de Balzac
... a revolution was not made in the Constitution? No! Everything was done; because we commenced with reparation, not with ruin. Accordingly, the state flourished. Instead of lying as dead, in a sort of trance, or exposed, as some others, in an epileptic fit, to the pity or derision of the world, for her wild, ridiculous, convulsive movements, impotent to every purpose but that of dashing out her brains against the pavement, Great Britain rose above the standard even of her former self. An era of a more improved ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... had been healthy until twenty-one, and then had suffered from ovaritis, so that, although engaging in the work of a healthy woman, she should really be classed apart. One was subject to epileptic convulsions, and may therefore be fairly ruled out for the same reason. The remaining three were in good, even robust, general health. In two, pain was experienced for two days, and a certain diminution ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... people did not leave the table for fourteen hours. The grave-digger did the cooking, and did it very well. He was renowned for that, and he left his ovens to come and dance and sing between every two courses. And yet he was epileptic, was poor Pere Bontemps. Who would have suspected it? He was as fresh and vigorous and gay as a young man. One day we found him lying like a dead man in a ditch, all distorted by his malady, just at nightfall. We carried him to our house ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... even the London gamin knows a poet when he doesn't see one. Probably it rests upon the ancient tradition of oracles and sibyls, foaming at the mouth like champagne bottles. Inspiration meant originally demoniac possession, and to "modern thought" prophecy and poetry are both epileptic. "Genius is a degenerative psychosis of the epileptoid order." A large experience of poets has convinced me as little of this as of the old view summed up in genus irritabile vatum. Poets seem to me the homeliest and most hardworking of mankind—'t is a man in possession, not a daimon nor a ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... from Fuerth had created so much excitement that the police had to be called in. A cooper's widow, who had managed to pay her premiums for one year, but had been unable to continue the payment for the quite sufficient reason that she had been in the hospital, fell headlong to the floor in epileptic convulsions when she heard ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... reverses of fortune, he became discouraged and intemperate for some years, having in this period four children, two of whom we had now received into the asylum; a third one was idiotic, and the fourth epileptic. He then reformed in habits, had three more children, all now grown to maturity, and to this period remaining sound and healthy." Another similar case follows. An intemperate parent had four children, two of whom became insane, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... his Treatise on nervous disorders, does not hesitate to recommend amulets in epileptic disorders. "Take," says he, "some fresh peony roots, cut them into square bits, and hang them round the neck, changing them as often as they dry." It is not improbable that the hint was taken from this circumstance for the anodyne necklaces, which, some time ago, were in such repute, ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... more confused the Psychological physician became; and presently he got furious, burst out of the anti-spasmodic or round-about style and called Alfred a d—d ungrateful, insolent puppy, and went stamping about the room; and, finally, to the young man's horror, fell down in a fit of an epileptic character, grinding his teeth and ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... drunk at this moment and having had a whole glass of wine. I am speaking the truth. I assure you that this glance has haunted my dreams; the very rustle of her dress was more than I could stand at last. I really began to think that I might become epileptic. I could never have believed that I could be moved to such a frenzy. It was essential, indeed, to be reconciled, but by then it was impossible. And imagine what I did then! To what a pitch of stupidity a man can be ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... at that moment he thought to see me fall to the ground in an epileptic fit; I trembled ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... history really begins, for Caesar's capture of the British Isles was of slight importance viewed in the light of fast-receding centuries. There is little to-day in the English character to remind one of Caesar, who was a volatile and epileptic emperor with ...
— Comic History of England • Bill Nye
... pernicious vice. The drunkard, deprived of the sense and reason given us by God, profanes the donations of the divinity: he debases himself to the condition of brutes; unable even to guide his steps, he staggers and falls as if he were epileptic; he hurts and even risks killing himself; his debility in this state exposes him to the ridicule and contempt of every person that sees him; he makes in his drunkenness, prejudicial and ruinous bargains, and injures his fortune; he makes ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... peace of the epileptic or the mad. No, no, joy and health do not lie that way. If I were the scientist merely, I would say, 'Keep on, and I will stand by to observe your struggles.' But I am not, I am something else than scientist. It angers and agonizes me ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... will give three more cows. The father-in-law (an old deluder, overpaid at the beginning) accepts four, and rises to bind the bargain. The whole party, the young lady included, then falling into epileptic convulsions, and screeching, whistling, stamping, and yelling together - and nobody taking any notice of the young lady (whose charms are not to be thought of without a shudder) - the noble savage is considered married, and his friends make demoniacal ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... miscalculated the old man's infirm temper, and the daughter's skillful use of it. He was unprepared for Flip's boldness and audacity, and when he saw that both barrels of the accusation had taken effect on the charcoal-burner, who was rising with epileptic rage, he fairly turned and fled. The old man would have followed him with objurgation beyond the door, but for the restraining hand ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... possible, and consign her to her mother, who lives in Paris. She should be placed in the care of a physician and under guardianship. She has been trained to do a certain dance, during which she falls into a pathologic condition not unlike an epileptic fit. She turns stiff and rigid as a block of wood, her eyes start from her head, she plucks at her clothes. Finally, she falls into a faint and loses consciousness of her surroundings. Such things ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... this Letter reaches you, but you may be amused and glad to have it from me. Not that I have come into Suffolk on any cheerful Errand: I have come to bury dear old Mr. Crabbe! I suppose you have had some Letters of mine telling you of his Illness; Epileptic Fits which came successively and weakened him gradually, and at last put him to his Bed entirely, where he lay some while unable to move himself or to think! They said he might lie so a long time, since he eat and drank with fair Appetite: but suddenly the End came on and after a twelve ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... relates that he had violent pains in the bowels at first, then convulsions, in consequence of which he was confined to his bed two months, since when the attacks of convulsions have increased in frequency, are now daily, accompanied often by ten to twenty epileptic fits, his right arm is paralysed, and the physicians tell him that he can never regain the use of his limbs. In one factory were found in the dipping-house four men, all epileptic and afflicted with severe colic, and eleven boys, several of whom were already epileptic. In short, this frightful ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... unpardonable. In his later manner Michelet is more Michelet than ever before. There is no common sense in it; it is simply wonderful! Neither art nor science, neither criticism nor narrative; only furies and fainting-spells and epileptic fits over matters which he never deigns to explain. Childish outcries—envies de femme grosse!—and a style, my friends!—not a single finished phrase! It ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... but too common in childhood, and as to which a few words apart are needed. Usually a child epileptic for some years will carry the disease with it for a time, the length of which no man can set. The disease may be such as to ruin mind and body, or the attacks may be rare, and not prevent courageous and resolute natures from leading useful lives. All intermediate degrees are possible. ...
— Doctor and Patient • S. Weir Mitchell
... injured on one side, and more than one child has been born with the same organ affected on the same side, the chances against mere coincidence are enormous. But perhaps the most remarkable and trustworthy fact is that given by Dr. Brown-Sequard,[63] namely, that many young guinea-pigs inherited an epileptic tendency from parents which had been subjected to a particular operation, inducing in the course of a few weeks a convulsive disease like epilepsy: and it should be especially noted that this eminent physiologist bred a large number of guinea-pigs from ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... attacked by a kind of epileptic fit, when he was going about acting Christmas plays, or mummeries: this he ascribed to a blow given by an invisible hand. He was afterwards seized by fits; during which he declared with a roaring voice that he was the devil, and sung different songs ...
— Apparitions; or, The Mystery of Ghosts, Hobgoblins, and Haunted Houses Developed • Joseph Taylor
... sexual abstinence are the foundation of any successful treatment. It is probable that we have returned to Alexander's treatment of epilepsy much more nearly than is generally thought. There are those who still think that remedies of various kinds do good, but in the large epileptic colonies regular exercise, bland diet, regulation of the bowels, and avoidance of excesses of all kinds, with occupation of mind, constitute ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... lords rebel; Bring oil to fire, snow to their colder moods; Renege, affirm, and turn their halcyon beaks With every gale and vary of their masters, Knowing naught, like dogs, but following.— A plague upon your epileptic visage! Smile you my speeches, as I were a fool? Goose, an I had you upon Sarum plain, I'd drive ...
— The Tragedy of King Lear • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... a crescent on the court were occupied by lady-boarders not suffering from mental alienation or any loss of faculty, but from decayed fortunes. The deaf and dumb, the blind, the crippled, epileptic, and insane had separate dwellings built apart in the formal luxuriant gardens. "We have patients of all nations," said the sister. "Strangers see none of these; there have been distressing recognitions." Bessie was not desirous of ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... of a young man of twenty-three, who showed a psychopathic personality with tainted heredity on the paternal side. He was subject to convulsive attacks, which were regarded as hysterical and not epileptic. In his intelligence he was above the average. He was engaged to a young woman, and because she refused to marry him, he at first contemplated to take his life, but later shot at her three times without injuring her, and then ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... details of the fatal event. It had occurred that morning. Mrs. Cadurcis, who had never slept a wink since her knowledge of her son's undoubted departure, and scarcely for an hour been free from violent epileptic fits, had fallen early in the morning into a doze, which lasted about half an hour, and from which her medical attendant, who with Pauncefort had sat up with her during the night, augured the most favourable ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... able indeed to go about, but he was like a worm-eaten plant, there seemed to be but little life within him. Old Hetfalusy, on the other hand, had altogether succumbed to his woe, he had taken to his bed, and was frequently tormented by epileptic fits. ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... 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 springing up began their dance amid strange contortions. Yet the malady ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... and Holmes sprang upon him like so many staghounds. He was dragged back into the room, and then commenced a terrific conflict. So powerful and so fierce was he, that the four of us were shaken off again and again. He appeared to have the convulsive strength of a man in an epileptic fit. His face and hands were terribly mangled by his passage through the glass, but loss of blood had no effect in diminishing his resistance. It was not until Lestrade succeeded in getting his hand inside his neckcloth and half-strangling him that we made him realize ...
— A Study In Scarlet • Arthur Conan Doyle |
