In spite of epilepsy ; being a review of the lives of three great epileptics,--Julius Caesar, Mohammed, Lord Byron,--the founders respectively of an empire, a religion, and a school of poetry / by Matthew Woods.
- Matthew Woods
- Date:
- 1913
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: In spite of epilepsy ; being a review of the lives of three great epileptics,--Julius Caesar, Mohammed, Lord Byron,--the founders respectively of an empire, a religion, and a school of poetry / by Matthew Woods. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.
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![It would be interesting, if there were not too much travail of soul without it, just as one runs through a bazaar for curios, to roam through Byron's writings for descriptions of swoons, bursts of abnormal passion and violence, faintings, ecstasies, enthusiasms of a moment, silent rages, syncopes, and other occasional concom- itants of epileptic dyscrasia scattered here and there through his poetry and prose. And nearly always these descriptions are autobiographic. They might dis- cover the heart of his mystery, and reveal his psychosis. Just one illustration, and that from Mazeppa, occurs to me as a very good poetic description of an epileptic seizure as evidently experienced by its author, although given as an account of the feelings experi- enced by a man tied to the back of a runaway horse, who had found relief in unconsciousness. The earth gives way; The sky rolls round; I seem to sink upon the ground. My heart turned sick, my brain grew sore And throbbed awhile, then beat no more. The sky spun like a mighty wheel, I saw the trees like drunkards reel And a light flash [the aura] sprang o'er my eyes Which saw no further. He who dies Can die no more than then I died. I felt the blackness come and go, And strove to wake, but could not make My senses climb up from below. The first two and the last two lines are luminously de-](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21166432_0307.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
