This is a book about representations of epilepsy. To a point, it is also about those who experience the condition; or, more accurately, any one of the multiple forms the condition may take. Specifically, though, it is about trade routes between culture and medicine and an unacknowledged traffic between systems of representation that accrete to produce the complex and layered meanings adhering to epilepsy and ‘the epileptic’. Throughout the following pages, I explore the notion that medical stories of epilepsy from the late nineteenth century through to the present are as much forged by the cultural conditions and representational politics...

At the dawn of medicine’s engagement with seizure conditions, Aretaeus proclaimed ‘Epilepsy is an illness of various shapes and horrible’.¹ Over 2,000 years later, the medical descendants of Hippocrates and Aretaeus shouldered the task of trying to understand this most puzzling of chronic neurological conditions with renewed vigour. The closing decades of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of neurology as a specialist medical discourse. Committed to moving beyond the rather bleak epilepsy stories bequeathed them by their predecessors, these latter-day physicians determined to cultivate an innovative system of representation specific to their areas of concern. The hope was that...

The Hippocratic physicians insisted that epilepsy was a physical disease rather than a metaphysical mutation. This way of thinking about the disorder circulated beyond Cos and into a new millennium: Galen developed his theories about the disorder from similar principles. Nevertheless, fear that epilepsy signified spiritual contagion from possession was to play a part in discriminatory and stigmatising processes in biblical narratives. That fear reappeared in the political propaganda circulated in early seventeenth-century debates about witchcraft, religious faith and knowledge boundaries. By the eighteenth century, the notion that epilepsy was contagious had been more or less refuted, only to be...

In 1886, almost fifty years after Monks seized the reading public’s imagination and his ‘evil passions, vice, and profligacy’ found expression in the ‘hideous disease’ that figured him epileptic, Robert Louis Stevenson published his novellaStrange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Through the character of the physician, Henry Jekyll, and his alter-ego, Edward Hyde, Stevenson explores nineteenth-century social and cultural conventions that seem to necessitate a double self. In doing so, he raises questions about identity, specifically in relation to the impossible yet necessary repressions entailed in constituting an identity that is both socially appropriate and seemingly integrated....

At the close of the nineteenth century, ‘epileptic danger’ proved to be as much about economic viability as about hereditary contamination. In the industrialised spaces of a waning century, the epileptic figure acquired different meanings and connotations than had been evident in earlier systems of representation. Prognostications about epileptics meshed with capitalist narratives of maximum production, output and profit. Ideas of epileptic taint and epileptic disability became infused with those theories of temporal efficiency and scientific management that had become the organising principles of the factory floor. Defined by its unpredictability within this new social and representational matrix, the epileptic...

Another century; other cities; other mediums; new technologies. Well into the twentieth century the convulsive figure given literary presence by Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Thomas Hardy and Robert Louis Stevenson continued to thrive in literature. Visual representations of the seizure-prone body migrate from medical photographic and film projects to mainstream cinema. Films as diverse asThe Big Sleep,The Andromeda Strain,Romper Stomper and Deceiver, as well as television shows such asAmerican GothicandThe X Files, all draw upon the metaphorical capital of the epileptic or convulsing body to evoke the threat of chaos lurking beneath a patina...

The epilepsies, like all other changes to physical and psychological health, are always experienced within a specific historical and cultural context. The specificities of these contexts will not only colour how an epilepsy is experienced and lived but also influence medical interpretations and responses to the syndrome: what the epilepsies meant to the physicians of ancient Greece is clearly not the same as their signification for the apostles of Jesus when he heals the afflicted son of a follower in the mountains of Bethsaida almost 500 years later. Within the spatiality of a late nineteenth-century mill, the seized body invokes...