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 of the times as they are by the science of western medicine. It is, perhaps, a bold claim and testing its limits will require multiple border crossings. These border crossings will be made through time, and across discursive boundaries, and will engage with various genres of epilepsy narrative.