Theses de epilepsia

VIII.

Of the intrinsic causes, some are proximate, and others are remote.

IX.

The proximate cause of Epilepsy is a matter which, by its malignancy, infests the ventricles of the brain and provokes it to its own expulsion.

X.

Moreover, the more remote internal causes, which they call προηγουμένας—that is, antecedent—are a certain διάθεσις or ἐπιτηδειότης of the brain toward this disease: a weakness of the brain, either innate from nature or acquired; humors or vapors, for the most part phlegmatic or melancholic, collected in the brain, the stomach, and other parts.

XI.

External causes, or προκαταρκτικαὶ, are not of one kind. For some prepare the body so that it may more easily be affected; others, as it were, supply the matter and generate the true causes; others set the same in motion; others, finally, by an occult property hostile to the brain, provoke and exacerbate the epileptic paroxysms.

XII.

Of this sort, for example, are vitiated air, excrementitious foods, gluttony, surfeit; foods which the sick person hates and loathes, or which otherwise produce nausea in him; foul and unpleasant odors; immoderate sleep, especially in the afternoon; immoderate venery; the suppression of accustomed evacuations; labor or exercise in plethoric and cacochymic bodies; anger; idleness. Likewise, parsley, myrrh, the liver of a he-goat, fumigation from a goat's horn, etc.

XIII.

Furthermore, that an epilepsy is about to attack is foretold, among other things, by dimness of the eyes, vertigo, heaviness, pain and repletion of the head (especially from anger), a defect or aberration of reason, a forgetting of those things which have been said, sadness and sorrow creeping on unexpectedly, and horrific images occurring in sleep.