"Epileptic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... screech, whistle, stamp, and yell in reply, that they 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 ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... 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 turn our thoughts to the second, Bonaparte. But as it turns ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... bills presented to the Legislature "relating to and regulating marriage" include among the items "prohibition of marriage within six months after a divorce has been granted from a former spouse; and forbidding of marriage between persons either one of whom is epileptic, imbecile, feeble-minded, insane, an habitual drunkard, affected with a venereal disease, or addicted to the use of opium, morphine, or cocaine." This indicates the trend of newer laws regulating marriage. Is this trend justified? If ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... above my head Begins irascibly to flare and fret, Wheezing into its epileptic jet, Reminding me I ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 • Various
... open the entire flank, the knotted viscera were drawn into great hard lumps beneath the tight-drawn skin, while as the effect of certain wounds the patient frothed at the mouth and writhed like an epileptic. Here and there were cases where the lungs had been penetrated, the puncture now so minute as to permit no escape of blood, again a wide, deep orifice through which the red tide of life escaped in torrents; and ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... 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, and the ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... 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, ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... Epileptic or falling sickness fits, as they are sometimes denominated, are another very common scourge of secret vice. How much they are to be dreaded almost every one can judge; for there are few who have not seen those ...
— The Young Man's Guide • William A. Alcott
... is an honorable man, and has told you the truth," said Baron von Worndle, gravely. "Your violent accusation frightened him; and he fell into an epileptic fit. He is affected with that disease." ...
— Andreas Hofer • Lousia Muhlbach
... descendants of the drunkard or the debauchee. Intellectual blemish will almost always accompany material blemish. The soul will be attacked simultaneously with the body; and it matters but little whether the victim be imbecile, mad, epileptic, possessed of criminal instincts, or only vaguely threatened with slight mental derangement: the most frightful moral penalty that a supreme justice could invent has followed actions which, as a rule, cause less harm and are less perverse ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... the obstinate silence of the criminal gave no clue. Monsieur de 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 he could ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... 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 ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... toward hysteria was the outcome of his own temperament. He was primarily a neurologist, the bent of his genius was toward the investigation of facts that could be objectively demonstrated. His first interest in hysteria, dating from as far back as 1862, was in hystero-epileptic convulsive attacks, and to the last he remained indifferent to all facts which could not be objectively demonstrated. That was the secret of the advances he was enabled to make in neurology. For purely psychological investigation he had no liking, and probably ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... 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 name was Mina; and her history is ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 401, November 28, 1829 • Various
... the seaman's trick 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 a longing ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... 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 ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... that in the case of an old epileptic who had been accustomed to take nitrate of silver as a remedy, the choroid plexuses were remarkably dark, and from their surface could be scraped a brownish black, soot-like material, and a similar substance was found lying quite free in the cavity of the fourth ventricle, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... 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 animals which had ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... 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 how ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... and the demon, but the demon and his fellows); and the recognition of Christ's holiness, which lashes unholiness into a paroxysm of mingled despair and hate. Does this sound like a madman, or an epileptic, or like a spirit which knew more than men knew, and trembled and hated more than they could do? There is nothing more terrible than the picture, self-drawn in these spasmodic words, of a spirit which, by its very foulness, is made shudderingly ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... American Indians it is believed that those who are insane or epileptic are "possessed of devils." (Tylor, "Prim. Cult.," vol. ii., pp. 123-126.) Sickness is caused by evil spirits entering into the sick person. (Eastman's "Sioux.") The spirits of animals are much feared, and their departure ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... Annabel was seated with Doctor Masham, and giving him the 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
... of having at intervals attacks of convulsive discharge of nerve-force. Some years since I saw in consultation a case which well illustrates this point. A boy was struck in the head with a brick, and dropped unconscious. On coming to be was seized with an epileptic convulsion. These convulsions continually recurred for many months before I saw him. He never went two hours without them, and had usually from thirty to forty a day—some, it is true, very slight, but others ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... ripples, and the trampling died out like the rustle of a spent wind. Elizabeth was only indirectly conscious of this; she had rung the bell, and was bending over Lucetta, who remained convulsed on the carpet in the paroxysms of an epileptic seizure. She rang again and again, in vain; the probability being that the servants had all run out of the house to see more of the Daemonic Sabbath than ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... considered his weakness. As his only chance of health lay in complete rest during the holiday, this plan of spending the summer in study was simply a death sentence. In July, while at work on logarithm tables, he was overtaken by a sudden fainting fit, evidently of an epileptic nature. The malady gained strength, aided by the weakness of his heart and lungs, and he died on ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... 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, ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... to say, had a good deal of trouble with some of our men here. One disappeared directly we arrived, and has never been seen since. Another came off suffering from delirium tremens and epileptic fits, brought on by drink. His cries and struggles were horrible to hear and witness. It took four strong men to hold him, and the doctor was up with him all last night. Nearly all the ships that come here have been at sea for a long time, and the men are simply wild when they get ashore. Some ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... various circumstances in which his immortal ambition and ceaseless malignity may place him. In the first act, he should assume the tone of the fallen hero, which would by no means become him when in corporal possession of a Jewish epileptic, and bargaining for his pis aller in a herd of swine. Then again, as a leader of the army of St. Dominick, he should have a fiercer tone of bigotry, and less political finesse, than as a privy ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... 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 trickery ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... yellow spawn foaming over his bony epileptic lips) She sold lovephiltres, whitewax, orangeflower. Panther, the Roman centurion, polluted her with his genitories. (He sticks out a flickering phosphorescent scorpion tongue, his hand on his fork) Messiah! He burst her tympanum. (With ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... panic, but 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 ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... imperfect development of speech, mental defect, imbecility or idiocy. When he found families in which such defective children occurred, he then inquired as to their ancestry. Many of these children, he found, were reduced to a condition approaching epilepsy, or actually epileptic, because they themselves were alcoholic. Obviously such material can not legitimately be used to prove that the use of alcohol by parents injures the heredity of their children. The figures do not at all give the proof we are seeking, ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... from an old colored man who used to work for my father years ago. Queer how such things stick to one, isn't it? But I don't just know how to describe what Burton told me about his daughter in any other way. She wasn't an epileptic. That's a thing one goes down under; and her case was just the reverse. She was, as a rule, propped up in a chair, as weak as a kitten; but when these things took her, she grew immensely strong and ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Criminologist • John T. McIntyre
... 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 ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... superiority. The new war changed nothing but the color of maps, the design of postage stamps, and the relationship of a few accidentally conspicuous individuals. In one of the last of these international epileptic fits, for example, the English, with much dysentery and bad poetry, and a few hundred deaths in battle, conquered the South African Boers at a gross cost of about three thousand pounds per head—they could have bought ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... not spoken in vain. Griffith's features were horribly distorted, his eyes rolled fearfully, and he fell to the ground, grinding his teeth, and foaming at the mouth. An epileptic fit! ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... to Numbers of Mental Defectives: Education Department Returns; Retardation, Problem of; Feeble-minded and Epileptic Cases, ...
— Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders • W. H. Triggs, Donald McGavin, Frederick Truby King, J. Sands Elliot, Ada G. Patterson, C.E. Matthews
... There were two invalids to be seen to. Young Szephalmi was 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
... 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 ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... also in animals born of parents having been rendered epileptic by the section of the ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... 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 so dark in October, 1797, that in spite of misgivings and former scruples he had concluded ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... he figured, and what immortal legend justified his 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, leave it. It was a place ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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
... those turns, however, which it pleases Providence for his own wise purposes frequently to ordain, to mock our best hopes and baffle our most sanguine expectations, this admirable woman was, contrary to every antecedent prognostic, visited in her travail with epileptic fits, in which she expired, "leaving," (as the sublime Burke no less truly than pathetically said on the death of doctor Johnson,) "not only nothing to fill her place, but nothing that has a tendency to ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... 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
... confidence. I had heard that the Italians were a nervous 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. 'By all means you can see my front. But no ...
— A Visit to Three Fronts • Arthur Conan Doyle
... 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 ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... house," answered Dr. Mirandolet, in a sharp, staccato voice. "A policeman was bending over him. Mr. Gardiner hurriedly told us what he had seen. My first thought was that the man was in what is commonly termed a fit—some form of epileptic seizure, you know. I hastily examined him—and found that my first ...
— The Orange-Yellow Diamond • J. S. Fletcher
... Lestrade, 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 ...
— A Study In Scarlet • Arthur Conan Doyle
... and their cattle and children were, in consequence, always liable to serious accidents of one kind or another. Sometimes they were bitten by snakes, sometimes became possessed by devils, and, at others, were thrown down and beaten most unmercifully. Any person who falls down in an epileptic fit is supposed to be thrown down by a ghost, or possessed by a devil.[3] They feel little of our mysterious dread of ghosts; a sound drubbing is what they dread from them, and he who hurts himself ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... 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 off, in the ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... recollection of Misha's father, Andrei Nikolaevitch Polteff. He was a genuine, old-fashioned landed proprietor, a pious inhabitant of the steppes, sufficiently well educated,—according to the standards of that epoch,—rather crack-brained, if the truth must be told, and subject, in addition, to epileptic fits.... That also is an old-fashioned malady.... However, Andrei Nikolaevitch's attacks were quiet, and they generally terminated in a sleep and in a fit of melancholy.—He was kind of heart, courteous ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... to persons who propose to become citizens of this country, and we can well afford to insist upon adequate scrutiny of the character of those who are thus proposed for future citizenship. There should be an increase in the stringency of the laws to keep out insane, idiotic, epileptic, and pauper immigrants. But this is by no means enough. Not merely the Anarchist, but every man of Anarchistic tendencies, all violent and disorderly people, all people of bad character, the incompetent, the lazy, the vicious, the physically unfit, defective, or degenerate ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... to himself, "is but three and twenty. He is a better man than Lord Wellington with the gout, than the paralyzed Regent, than the epileptic royal family of Austria, ...
— Massimilla Doni • Honore de Balzac
... falsification entirely disproportionate to any discernible end in view, engaged in by a person who, at the time of observation, cannot definitely be declared insane, feebleminded, or epileptic. Such lying rarely, if ever, centers about a single event; although exhibited in very occasional cases for a short time, it manifests itself most frequently by far over a period of years, or even a life time. It represents a trait rather than ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... back her mind over the history of her life, and the misery which she had brought on all who belonged to her. Then at last she gave way, fell into tears, hysteric sobbings, convulsions so violent as for a time to take the appearance of epileptic fits, and was at last exhausted ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... the physiognomy of a criminal, flat nose, little penetrating eyes, under lids trembling with nervousness, the forehead large and well-shaped, the expressive mouth telling of tortures without count, of unfathomable melancholy, of morbid desires, endless compassion, passionate envy. An epileptic genius whose very exterior speaks of the stream of mildness that fills his heart, of the wave of almost insane perspicuity that gets into his head, finally the ambition, the greatness of endeavour, and the envy that small-mindedness begets.... ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... with some persons who lose weight in winter, and with more who fail in flesh in the spring, which is our season of greatest depression in health,—the season when with us choreas are apt to originate[5] or to recur, and when habitual epileptic fits become more frequent in such as are the victims ...
— Fat and Blood - An Essay on the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria • S. Weir Mitchell
... King of England's face uncoffined. Isabeau found her a madwoman. The girl swept opposition before her with gusts of demoniacal fury, wept, shrieked, tore at her hair, and eventually fell into a sort of epileptic seizure; between rage and terror she became a horrid, frenzied beast. I do not dwell upon this, for it is not a condition in which the comeliest maid shows to advantage. But, for the Valois, insanity ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... eyes, covered them, turned away gasping. It couldn't be watched. An epileptic in a seizure can break the bones in a leg or arm by simultaneous contraction of opposing muscles. When all the opposed muscles of Hengly's body did this the results were ...
— The K-Factor • Harry Harrison (AKA Henry Maxwell Dempsey)
... "Sur'itu" I was possessed of a Jinn, the common Eastern explanation of an epileptic fit long before the days of the Evangel. See ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... syncope 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 rises from a reclining posture, especially ...
— DISTURBANCES OF THE HEART • OLIVER T. OSBORNE, A.M., M.D.
... 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 discovered ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... monograph devoted to the subject, endeavors to establish the existence, on the basis of degeneracy, of acute psychotic processes which do not belong to either the manic-depressive, hysterical, or epileptic temperaments, which cannot be placed under any of the known forms of dementia praecox, and which develop as wholly independent psychotic manifestations in particularly predisposed individuals. The material which served for his thesis was gathered ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... 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 ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... 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 ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... Brown-Sequard's discovery that an epileptic tendency artificially produced by mutilating the nervous system of a guinea-pig is occasionally inherited may be a fact of "considerable weight," or on the other hand it may be entirely irrelevant. Cases of this kind strike one as peculiar ...
— Are the Effects of Use and Disuse Inherited? - An Examination of the View Held by Spencer and Darwin • William Platt Ball
... most important question is as to those vicious habits in which there is no love to sin, but only a dread and recoiling from intolerable pain, as in the case of the miserable drunkard! I trust that these epileptic agonies are rather the punishments than the augumenters of his guilt. The annihilation of the wicked is a fearful thought, yet it would solve many difficulties both in natural religion and in Scripture. And Taylor in his Arminian dread of Calvinism is always too shy ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... on his leg Waiting until the shriek subsides. The epileptic on the bed Curves backward, clutching at ...
— Poems • T. S. [Thomas Stearns] Eliot
... 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 I ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... second generation. 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 of hereditary transmission ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur
... 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 the mainstay of ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... ordinary 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 might ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... probably epilepsy, a disease which is compatible with great powers of endurance and great mental energy, as is proved by the cases of Julius Caesar and Napoleon. He was liable to mystical trances, in which some have found a confirmation of the supposition that he was epileptic. But these abnormal states were rare with him; in writing to the Galatians he has to go back fourteen years to the date when he was 'caught up into the third heaven,' The visions and voices which attended his active ministry prove nothing about ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... the torrent, Hilda had seen a well-dressed epileptic youth, in charge of an elderly woman, approaching the station. He had passed slowly close by her, as she modestly waited in her hasty mourning, and she had had a fearful vision of his idiotic greenish face supported somehow like a mask at the summit of that shaky structure ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... dancing and singing, until midnight. The old 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
... what epileptic contortions the loss of money can drive an assemblage of men, who has not seen a meeting of shareholders on the morrow of a great disaster, with their clinched fists, their convulsed faces, their glaring ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... 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
... at this very wine party he was the life of everything, as he sat up there between Diogenes—whom he kept in a constant sort of mild epileptic fit, from laughter, and wine going the wrong way (for whenever Diogenes raised his glass Blake shot him with some joke)—and the Captain who watched him with the most undisguised admiration. A singular contrast, the two men! Miller, ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... from the very outset, appear made to be 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 had no swaddling bands; the children grew up free ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... 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 widow, forty days after the death of Zeno, ...
— 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
... an unexpected fright, often produces epileptic fits, and other dangerous disorders. Many young people have lost their lives or their senses by the foolish attempts of producing violent alarm, and the mind has been thrown into such disorders as never again to act with regularity. A settled dread and anxiety ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... that can settle down upon man. Wise? Oh, yes, we'll grant that, but as I before remarked, my wisdom lacks proper direction. It is like ill-directed energy, and that, you know, counts for nothing. I once knew a fellow that expended enough energy in epileptic fits to have made him a fortune. He'd fall down and kick and paw the air—a regular engine of industry, but it was all wasted. But he had a brother, a lazy fellow, and he conceived the idea of a sort of gear for him, ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... on his oars and stopped rowing. He panted, he gnashed his teeth, he frothed at the mouth, and when I thought he must be an epileptic, he lifted himself up with one strong shudder, and turning on me a face stern ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... through the streets from Chepeside to Walbrook, from Walbrook to St. Paul's; for the news of Edward's arrival, and the sudden agitation and excitement it produced on his enfeebled frame, had brought upon the poor king one of the epileptic attacks to which he had been subject from childhood, and which made the cause of his frequent imbecility; and, just recovered from such a fit,—his eyes vacant, his face haggard, his head drooping,—the spectacle of such an antagonist to the vigorous Edward moved only pity in ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... with the dipping two years while a boy, 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 ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... which she was peering. She was taken by surprise. In their personal relations Iemon had always been more than considerate. For some weeks in secret she had been using this drug of Suian Sensei. In childhood O'Iwa had shown something of an epileptic tendency. This had worn off with time. Of late the recurrence had alarmed her. The drug of Suian, at the time anyhow, made her less conscious of the alarmed critical feeling which heralded ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... barouche with outriders, launched packets of tracts among the cottagers and 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 prodigious variety ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... one farm labourer, a kind of epileptic who, I found out, gave his services in return for being fed—no pay. He will regret this contract of his in time, as the food in question was bully beef and plum and apple jam, with an occasional change to Maconochie and apple and plum jam. That store ...
— Bullets & Billets • Bruce Bairnsfather
... Telemaque availed himself of this law to redeliver him to Captain Vesey on his return voyage to Sto. Domingo. For the royal physician of the town had meanwhile certified that the lad was subject to epileptic fits. The act of sale was thereupon cancelled, and the old relations of master and slave between Captain Vesey and Telemaque, were resumed. Thus, without design, perhaps, however passionately he might have desired it, ...
— Right on the Scaffold, or The Martyrs of 1822 - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 7 • Archibald H. Grimke
... kinds of instruments and vessels in their hands. Cambyses had, only a few minutes before, recovered consciousness, after lying for more than an hour in one of those awful fits, so destructive both to mind and body, which we call epileptic. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... young man can indulge in. It contracts the chest and weakens the lungs, thus predisposing to consumption. It impairs the stomach, thus producing indigestion. It debilitates the brain and nervous system, thus inducing epileptic fits and nervous depression. It stunts the growth, and is one cause of the present race of pigmies. It makes the young lazy and disinclined for work. It is one of the greatest curses of the present day. The following cases prove, more ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... 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 ye cackling home ...
— The Tragedy of King Lear • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... doctor, in the name of outraged society, as he called it, and in the name of justice and humanity, demanded the immediate arrest of Cocoleu, that wretch whose unconscious statement formed the basis of the accusation. He demanded with a furious oath that the epileptic idiot should be sent to the hospital, and kept there so as to be professionally examined by experts. The mayor had for some time refused to grant the request, which seemed to him unreasonable; but he doctor had talked so ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau
... like to know how high this strange legend can be traced. The other tradition that St. Paul was subject to epileptic fits, has a less legendary character. The phrase 'thorn in the flesh' is scarcely reconcilable with Luther's hypothesis, otherwise than as doubts of the objectivity of his vision, and of his after ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... 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 Chamber of Representatives. I could ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... nothing can be elicited. But after some minutes the stupor seems as it were less embarrassing to the patient, who appears less heavily slumbrous, and breathes lighter again; or it may be the reverse, particularly if the patient is epileptic; after a little, the breathing may be deeper, the state one of less composure. Pointing with the hands to the pit of the stomach, laying the hands upon the shoulders, and slowly moving them on the arms down to the hands, the whole with the utmost quietude and composure on the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... of 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 ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... hiding-place to resume her proper shape. In 1682 three women were executed at Exeter. Their witchcraft was of the same sort as that of the Bury witches. Little variety indeed appears in the English witchcraft as brought before the courts of law. They chiefly consist in hysterical, epileptic, or other fits, accompanied by vomiting of various witch-instruments of torture. The Exeter witches are memorable as the last executed ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... 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 ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... noted that in this matter the 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, or group of individuals, to supply, and that unless ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... not till some half-hour had passed that she grew calm as usual. Her father, knowing her hysterical tendencies, was always excessively anxious about this trait in his youngest girl, and feared the attack to be a species of epileptic fit. Not so her sister Julia. Julia had found Out what was the cause. At the moment before the jumping, only an exceptionally sensitive ear situated in the chimney-nook could have caught from down the flue the beat of a man's ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... digger for hidden treasure, and used a 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 Cumorah, now commonly known as Mormon Hill. It was not until ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous
... 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 doubtless made its appearance very variously, and was modified by temporary or ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... civil war would break out in a week. All records were broken by the Liberal Party, who rose as one man and cheered Mr. Tooth's declaration for ten minutes, many Members standing on their heads and waving their legs with epileptic fervour. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 8, 1914 • Various
... that veritable hell. It was from Occultism that I learned how you had made a stay alone in the haunted catacombs of Elora, in the far recesses of the Himalayas, and of the fearful experiences which, when you came out shuddering and ghastly, overcame to almost epileptic fear those who had banded themselves together to go as far as the rock-cut approach to ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... a child did not start in possession of health and strength, it was better both for itself and for the state that he should not live at all. Wherefore the women used to wash their newborn infants with wine, not with water, to make trial of their constitution. It was thought that epileptic or diseased children shrank from the wine and fell into convulsions, while healthy ones were hardened and strengthened by it. A certain supervision was exercised over the nurses, making them bring up the children without swaddling clothes, so as to make their ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... The irritative ideas of hearing are so increased in energy as to excite our attention. This happens in some diseases of the epileptic kind, and in some fevers. Hence the whispering of the currents of air in a room, the respiration of the company, and noises before unperceived, become troublesome; and sounds louder than usual, or unexpected, ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... Paris is completely epileptic. A result of the congestion caused by the siege. France, on the whole, has lived for several years in an extraordinary mental state. The success of la Lanterne and Troppman have been very evident symptoms of it. That folly is the result of too great imbecility, ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... riots, while they prevented any reactionary movement. The Emperor also was on the side of concession. He refused to let the people be fired on, and announced on the 14th the freedom of the press. But unfortunately he was seized with one of his epileptic fits; and the intriguers, who were already consolidating themselves into the secret council known as the "Camarilla," published the news of Windischgraetz's dictatorship, and resolved to place Vienna under a state of siege while the Emperor was ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... they live, the elementary atoms that produce it. We went crazy over catalepsy; and with the eagerness that boys throw into every pursuit, we endeavored to endure pain by thinking of something else. We exhausted ourselves by making experiments not unlike those of the epileptic fanatics of the last century, a religious mania which will some day be of service to the science of humanity. I would stand on Lambert's chest, remaining there for several minutes without giving him the slightest ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... 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 ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... that Brown-Sequard has bred during thirty years many thousand guinea-pigs from animals which had not been operated upon, and not one of these manifested the epileptic tendency. Nor has he ever seen a guinea-pig born without toes, which was not the offspring of parents which had gnawed off their own toes owing to the sciatic nerve having been divided. Of this latter fact thirteen instances were carefully ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... twitched like those of a man upon the verge of an epileptic fit, and the lines about his mouth were ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... 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, ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... unquestionable example of acquired and transmitted peculiarities, beyond the famous experiments of Brown-Sequard, repeated and confirmed by other physiologists.[41] By cutting the spinal cord or the sciatic nerve of guinea-pigs, Brown-Sequard brought about an epileptic state which was transmitted to the descendants. Lesions of the same sciatic nerve, of the restiform body, etc., provoked various troubles in the guinea-pig which its progeny inherited sometimes in a quite different form: exophthalmia, loss of toes, etc. But it is not ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... 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 ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead
... circumstances which, to minds so predisposed, might seem to indicate that a crime had been perpetrated. The fourteen Doctors who deliberated on the King's case contradicted each other and themselves. Some of them thought that his fit was epileptic, and that he should be suffered to have his doze out. The majority pronounced him apoplectic, and tortured him during some hours like an Indian at a stake. Then it was determined to call his complaint a fever, and to administer doses of bark. One physician, however, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... I do not wish to make you epileptic. You will see that, in guarding against ordinary justice, our mutual precautions were sufficient; but the extraordinary justice of him who holds us both in his ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... now, and he has the right to know who is his father. I do not know, and I never did know, never, never! I cannot tell you, my boy." He seemed to be losing his senses, his voice grew shrill and he worked his arms about as if he had an epileptic attack. "Come!... Give me an answer.... She does not know.... I will make a bet that she does not know ... No ... she does not know, by Jove!... She used to go to bed with both of us! Ha! ha! ha!... nobody knows ... nobody.... How can any one know such things?... You will ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... my shadow, and cursed profoundly, while his passion was mastering him. I noted with interest in that uncomfortable moment the clear signs of his epileptic tendencies, the twitching of the thumb that grasped the stick, the rigidity of the body, the curious working of certain facial muscles. I stood perfectly still, though my right hand involuntarily ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... we can perhaps understand why mistletoe has so long and so persistently been prescribed as a cure for the falling sickness. As mistletoe cannot fall to the ground because it is rooted on the branch of a tree high above the earth, it seems to follow as a necessary consequence that an epileptic patient cannot possibly fall down in a fit so long as he carries a piece of mistletoe in his pocket or a decoction of mistletoe in his stomach. Such a train of reasoning would probably be regarded even now as cogent by a large ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... Camille Mauclair assumes that the malady from which Antoine Watteau died was also a determining factor in his art, the French critic is not aping some modern men of science who denounce the writings of Dostoievsky because he suffered from epileptic fits. But there is a happy mean in this effort to correlate mind and body. If we are what we think or what we eat—and it is not necessary to subscribe to such a belief—then the sickness of the body is reflected in the soul, or vice versa. Byron was a healthy man naturally, ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... martyr to illness of an epileptic character; and Lady Mary gave him her sympathy. She was somewhat of a doctor—and being older than her friend, may have had the art of soothing sufferings, which were the worse because they were concealed. Whilst he writhed in pain, he was obliged to give vent to his agony by ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... warning, until she is suddenly seized with a convulsion, beginning in one half of the face, then involving the arm, next the leg of the same side of the body, until the convulsion, violent and purely epileptic form in character, becomes universal. This is attended by loss of consciousness, out of which she passes into a series of convulsions, gradually increasing in severity, in one of which she dies—or consciousness, partial or perfect, is regained, either, it may be, for a few ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... the pier above she saw her husband. He was leaning there, looking intently down; his tall broad figure made the people on each side of him seem insignificant. The clean-shaved, square-cut face, with those almost epileptic, forceful eyes, had a stillness and intensity beside which the neighbouring faces seemed to disappear. She saw him very clearly, even noting the touch of silver in his dark hair, on each side under his straw hat; noting that he seemed too ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... of day during an illness some years previously. Or, passing the house of a doctor when on a bus could produce a sudden outburst of anxiety, giddiness, and confusion; the patient had been taken into that house at the time of an epileptic attack. Or, showing photographs of the front could lead to an epileptic attack which was based on the memory of the time when the patient was wounded in the head; this has occurred on two separate occasions separated by an interval of some months. Or, noticing a ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various
... who had ever lived in the house, an unimpeachable ghost. All Miss Pew's young ladies believed firmly in that ghost; and there was a legend of a frizzy-haired girl from Barbados who had seen the ghost, and had incontinently gone out of one epileptic fit into another, until her father had come in a fly—presumably from Barbados—and carried her away for ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... aroused by either their own misery or at the sight of the misery of others, we would no more award the death penalty if the motive has been exclusively political, because they are much less dangerous than the criminal born. On the other hand, commitment to the asylum of the epileptic and the hysteric would be a practical measure, especially in France, where ridicule kills them. Martyrs are venerated and ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... 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 |
