Temporal Lobe Epilepsy, Dostoyevsky and Irrational Significance

doi:10.1017/9781316014165.010

Chapter 9 - Temporal Lobe Epilepsy, Dostoyevsky and Irrational Significance

from II.I - Clinical Conditions

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 October 2019

Alasdair Coles

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Alasdair Coles and

Joanna Collicutt

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Alasdair Coles: Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Joanna Collicutt: Affiliation:
University of Oxford

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Summary

An association of some sort between epilepsy and spirituality, both divine and demonic, has been postulated for millennia (reviewed in Devinsky and Lai 2008). No doubt, this is because people with epilepsy seem to become ‘possessed’ during their seizures, both in the convulsions of the generalised epilepsies and in the strange altered awareness of temporal lobe seizures. In addition, has been the observation that people with epilepsy may show an unusual interest in religion, recently documented in an ancient Babylonian text (Reynolds and Kinnier Wilson 2008). Some date the birth of rational medicine to Hippocrates’ denial that those with the ‘sacred disease’, epilepsy, had mystical power (Todman 2008).

Type: Chapter
Information: Neurology and Religion , pp. 89 - 100

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316014165.010 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2019

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