Historical Aspects of Epilepsy: Overview

Epilepsy has probably afflicted humans from their early evolution some 5 million years ago. Epilepsy has been one of the very few diseases that has been associated with so much medical and social attention, debate and misunderstanding. Patients with epilepsy, unlike many persons with other medical diseases, have been unfairly singled-out from medicine, religions and societies, prosecuted, and discriminated as being affected by magic, devils, or supernatural causes.

History has shown us most kinds of knowable past. The first recorded evidence of epilepsy is found in ancient Indian medicine of the Vedic period of 4500–1500 BC, but the main descriptions of the disease are mainly dated from 2000 BC as documented in the twenty-fifth Babylonian cuneiform tablet of “miqtu” (a disease where the person looses consciousness and foams at the mouth), the Indian Ayurvedic literature of Charaka Samhita, where epilepsy is described as “apasmara” (loss of consciousness) and the Hippocrates’ famous...