Epilepsy in Literature*

Abstract

Literary accounts of epilepsy deserve our attention because they form part of the cultural history of the disease and reflect responses to it by society. Epilepsy has been reviewed, mainly in the British literature, from Shakespeare to contemporary fiction, and reveals a wide range of images from the objective to the bizarre, based on observation, empathy, or manifold prejudices about the disorder. Epilepsy has been used in the plot of detective stories and as a challenge to movie actors. Some authors are factual and are well-informed, whereas others emphasize a fascination with ancient beliefs relating seizures to prophecy and divinity. In contemporary literature physicians are often represented as only marginally involved, distant, and helpless. Epilepsy is rarely viewed as a treatable disorder.

Full text

Epilepsia,
36(
Su
ppl
.
I):
S
124
17,
1995
Raven Press, Ltd., New
York
0
International League Against Epilepsy
Epilepsy in Literature*
Peter
Wolf
Epilepsie-Zentrum Bethel, Klinik Mara
I,
Bielefeld, Germany
Summary:
Literary accounts of epilepsy deserve our at-
tention because they form part of the cultural history of
the disease and reflect responses
to
it by society. Epi-
lepsy has been reviewed, mainly in the British literature,
from Shakespeare to contemporary fiction, and reveals a
wide range of images from the objective
to
the bizarre,
based on observation, empathy, or manifold prejudices
about the disorder. Epilepsy has been used in the plot
of
detective stories and as a challenge
to
movie actors.
Some authors are factual and are well-informed, whereas
others emphasize
a
fascination with ancient beliefs relat-
ing seizures to prophecy and divinity. In contemporary
literature physicians are often represented as only mar-
ginally involved, distant, and helpless. Epilepsy is rarely
viewed as
a
treatable disorder.
Key
Words:
Epilepsy-
Literature-Medieval literature-Modern literature-
Medicine in literature-Knowledge, attitudes, practice.
Epilepsy is one of the few diseases known since
the dawn of history, and its reflections in the arts
are as much a part of its cultural history as
is
med-
ical tradition. It has frequently been a subject of or
motive for literary fiction. This article is restricted,
with few exceptions, to authors who are British,
mainly Londoners.
Literary accounts form part of the manifold re-
sponses of society to the disease
(1)
and are an im-
portant aspect of its reality. They consider epilepsy
from a variety of viewpoints and raise many ques-
tions, the discussion of which has hardly begun.
OLDER
LITERATURE
When Kent, in
King Lear,
scolds Oswald, in
what could be called
a
catalogue of abuse in Eliza-
bethan English, one phrase is
“a
plague on your
epileptic visage”. This tells us something about the
image of epilepsy in that period which we do not
learn from medical texts.
And why “epileptic visage?” Does it refer to the
marks that repeated cuts and falls may leave on a
patient’s face? We may suspect
so
because some
200
years later, Dickens
(1837-1838)
referred to the
same feature in Oliver Twist’s wicked half-brother
Monks, whose epilepsy makes him easily recogniz-
able by his scarred face
(2).
“His lips are often dis-
coloured and disfigured with the marks of teeth, for
he has desparate [sic] fits.”
. .
.“You,
. . .
in whom
all evil passions, vice, and profligacy festered, till
they found
a
vent in
a
hideous disease which has
made your face an index even
to
your mind.” Ep-
ilepsy is seen as
a
punishment for Monks’ vices and
he dies of it. This was consistent with
a
traditional
religious view of disease at that time, but not spe-
cific for epilepsy. Dickens, however, the avid ob-
server of all aspects of life and mankind, especially
the somber ones, including disease, knew more
about epilepsy. He let the seizures be provoked by
startle and by emotions. Monks is first shown to the
reader in a sudden encounter with Oliver whom he
believed dead and out of the way. In an outburst of
anger, “[He] advanced towards Oliver,
as
if with
the intention of aiming
a
blow at him, but fell vio-
lently on the ground, writhing and foaming in
a
fit.”
Another fit is precipitated by
a
thunderclap. Monks
is described
as
a
ruthless half-criminal, governed by
hatred and base inclinations. The prejudice that re-
lates epilepsy to criminality, which we still must
fight today, seems to have existed already in Dick-
ens’ time.
Another stereotype, the relation of epilepsy to
feeblemindedness, is found in Thackeray’s
Vanity
Fair
(1847-1848),
in
which an old gentleman is de-
man.” His seizures also can be precipitated by
emotional stimuli. His daughter is
a
religious fanat-
Address correspondence and reprint requests to Dr.
P.
Wolf at
Epilepsie-Zentrum Bethel, Klinik Mara
1,
Maraweg
21,
33617,
Bielefeld, Germany.
*Dedicated
to
Professor Dieter Janz for his 75th birthday.
scribed
as
‘‘an epileptic and simple-minded noble-
s12

EPILEPSY
IN
LITERATURE
S13
icist who, by her awful pronouncements of future
punishment frightens the timid old gentleman, “and
the physicians declared his fits always occurred af-
ter one of her Ladyship’s sermons.”
In
Thackeray’s satire, however, there is also an-
other old gentleman whose life has only one more
purpose: to die
so
he may be inherited. Of him,
Thackeray wrote: “as soon as poor dear Lord
Castletoddy dies, who is quite epileptic
.
. .
,
which is of interest although or because it does not
make sense. Thackeray wrote
Vanity Fair
in
monthly installments, and the quotation is from
a
chapter that contains several errors
(3),
which are
probably due to the resultant time pressure. He ei-
ther became confused about the two old gentlemen
or
about “epileptic” and “apoplectic.”
I
am inclined
to believe the latter, because then the line would make
sense. The blunder may
also
tell us that the concepts
of epilepsy and apoplexy in the mid-nineteenth cen-
tury mind were perhaps not yet clearly distinct.
Still another ambiguity, between epilepsy and
catalepsy, is apparent
in
two works of that period
(4):
Alfred Tennyson’s “The Princess”
(1847-51)
and George Eliot’s
Silas Marner
(1861).“The Prin-
cess. A Medley” describes
a
prince’s courtship of
the princess
of
the neighboring kingdom.
As
chil-
dren, they had been engaged but she has now
founded an all-women society in which men are not
allowed to enter. The long poem is partly satirical
and partly allegorical and deals with the theme of
finding one’s own identity as man
or
woman.
As
a
metaphor of the prince’s indecision and ambiva-
lence, he suffers from “weird seizures,” during
which he loses the ability to distinguish the sub-
stance from the shadow, dream from reality. The
seizures eventually remit when the prince and prin-
cess find each other and themselves in mature love.
The description of the seizures is highly suggestive
of an epileptic aura with an experience of derealiza-
tion, although the diagnosis given is catalepsy. Bar-
bara Herb Wright
(5)
has clarified that Tennyson
probably used his own father’s seizures as a model.
These were obviously complex partial seizures
(CPS), but the diagnosis given to the family was
catalepsy, perhaps with a purpose of extenuation.
Tennyson had in his possession Quincy’s medical
dictionary of
1802,
in which the definition of cata-
lepsy overlapped to some extent with complex par-
tial seizures:
9,
The patients are said to be
for
some minutes, some-
times (though rarely) for some hours, deprived of
their senses, and
all
power
of
voluntary motion.
. . .
When they recover from the paroxysm, they remem-
ber nothing
of
what passed
during
the time of it, but
are like persons awakened out of a sleep.
This is too different from the prince’s seizures to
possibly have been used by Tennyson. It would
seem, however, that Quincy’s
or
a similar definition
and description were closely followed by George
Eliot when she described the trances of Silas
Marner to whom she gave a diagnosis of catalepsy.
During the trances, Marner falls into
a
motionless
state that lasts
for
a
few minutes to more than one
hour, and for which he has no recollection, even of
their occurrence. Such states today would not be
diagnosed as catalepsy but as twilight states, raising
a suspicion of nonconvulsive status epilepticus. In
Silas Marner,
they are highly important for the nar-
rative.
In
his religious community, Marner had been
highly respected for his exemplary life, and his
trances had been considered
a
sign of divine distinc-
tion. Then, however, an enemy suggests that they
are of satanic origin, and a theft is blamed on him
during one of the twilight states. He is expelled
from his community and lives a solitary life as
a
weaver in
a
far village where he
is
considered an
outsider because of his seclusion and his seizures.
He slowly collects
a
treasure of gold sovereigns
which becomes his onlyjoy in life. When one day
these are stolen, the compassion of his neighbors
makes him again part of
a
community. During an-
other trance,
a
small orphan girl with golden hair
crawls into his cottage, which restores his golden
treasure in a much better form. Eliot said that in this
novel she had tried to write a legendary tale in
a
realistic way. Marner’s twilight states, apart from
making certain events possible, explain his help-
lessness and passivity, which are important for the
legendary atmosphere and would otherwise seem
unnatural (6).
Wilkie Collins, who was
a
friend of Charles Dick-
ens, was mostly concerned in his novel
Poor Miss
Finch
(1872)
with new discoveries about the expe-
riential space of blind people and its transformation
after successful ophthalmic surgery. The beautiful
and capricious blind Lucilla returns the love of
Os-
car, whose vicious twin brother Nugent tries to win
Lucilla for himself. Nugent’s hopes are based on
the moment when Lucilla’s sight will be restored by
an operation, because she has
a
prejudice against
dark colors, and the twins are indistinguishable but
for their complexion. The bad brother Nugent has
a
fair skin, whereas Oscar, the good brother, has a
dark skin as a result of treatment with silver nitrate
for epilepsy. His epilepsy is traumatic and caused
by
a
brain concussion after
a
robbery which has its
own place in the plot of Collins’ novel. There is
a
clear, detached, almost clinical description of a con-
vulsive seizure with
a
right versive onset and the
reactions of an onlooker (the narrator) and
a
physi-

S14
P.
WOLF
cian. The diagnosis
is
calmly given, and etiology
and therapy are part of the case history in this re-
alistic novel.
A
frightful contortion fastened itself on Oscar’s face.
His eyes turned up hideously. From his head
to
foot
his whole body was wrenched round, as if giant
hands had twisted it, towards the right. Before
I
could speak, he was in convulsions on the
floor
at his
doctor’s feet.
“Good God, what is this!”
I
cried out.
The doctor loosened his cravat, and moved away the
furniture that was near him. That done, he waited-
looking at the writhing figure
on
the
floor.
“Can you do nothing more?”
I
asked.
He shook his head gravely. “Nothing more.”
“What is it?”-“An epileptic fit.”
Silver nitrate was a common treatment for epi-
lepsy
in
the mid-nineteenth century. It was mostly
useless, and “argyrism was a common result of this
type of treatment. Todd complained of the fact that
so
many patients showed in the discoloration of
their faces the indelible marks of the ineffective
treatment they had undergone”
(7).
Collins
,
how-
ever, wished better for Oscar and let him be cured
by this therapy.
Eliot and Collins shared that sense of profes-
sional quality characteristic of the great English re-
alist authors of the
last
century who felt that they
owed their readers a well-constructed plot with no
hanging loose ends, and factual precision, including
in regard to medical or legal questions. One of the
consequences is that their epileptic characters are
depicted according to the best available medical in-
formation, and they are described with sympathy
and dignity.
THE DETECTIVE STORY
Some of Collins’ works are early examples of the
detective story, a genre which derives partly from
the romantic-fantastic and partly from the realist
novel. One of its masters, Agatha Christie followed
in
the tradition of the great realists when, in
The
ABC
Murders
(1936), she described
a
highly intelli-
gent criminal who with an almost perfect plan
makes all clues in a series of murders
to
incriminate
a veteran who suffers from traumatic epilepsy and
cannot account for what he may have done in
a
seizure which makes him
a
good suspect in some
people’s eyes. Christie’s Hercule Poirot, however,
with his clear reasoning, discovers the improbabil-
ities
in
the story and rescues the poor man who is
quite unable to defend himself.
To
hang a murder on
a
person with epilepsy who
has lapses of consciousness during which he
or
she
may be suspected to act in an irresponsible way is
a
temptation not only to
a
scoundrel in
a
detective
story but also to writers of mysteries. Another cel-
ebrated writer, the Californian Raymond Chandler
in
The Big Sleep
(1939) fell for the temptation and
created Carmen, a lovely halfwit with an uncon-
vincing, unprofessional seizure description who in a
twilight state kills her sister’s husband after having
unsuccessfully tried to seduce him. Although Chan-
dler tells his readers that epilepsy is a treatable dis-
ease-which is something-his treatment of the
condition
is
in
a
problematic way influenced by
pre-
conceived ideas rather than facts. The comparison
between Chandler and Christie clearly does credit
to Christie’s better insight.
FICTION AND OBSERVATION
From the same time period, there is a reappear-
ance of epilepsy as caricature. Among the bizarre
characters who give Mervyn Peake’s
Titus Groane
(1946)
its specific flavor are the silly old twin aunts
who in their youth had convulsions, after which one
side of their bodies was “starved,” though they
never can agree on which one.
Even in novels that do not belong to the realm of
the fantastic, however, the example of the great re-
alists’ was not always followed. Compare the sei-
zure description in
Poor Miss Finch
with the fol-
lowing:
Their attention was caught by the sound as of
a
horse
galloping. They looked up
a
side-street in the direc-
tion of the sound and found it to come from
a
man
lying
on
his back outside
a
pub. His legs were kicking
out and his heels clop-clopped on the pavement.
A
few people had gathered in the roadway and
a
young
policeman circled round the man as if he were
a
tiger.
“Is
he drunk?” Matthew said.
Ronald went over to the young policeman. “Turn his
head to one side,” he said,
“or
he might damage his
tongue.
”
“Are you a doctor?” said the policeman.
“No,
but
I
understand fits. The man’s
an
epileptic.”
Ronald took his own wedge
of
cork from his pocket
and handed it to the policeman.” Stick this between
his teeth. Then kneel
on
his knees and try and get his
boots off.”
“There’s an ambulance coming,” said the police-
man.
“He could bite his tongue in the meantime,” Ronald
said. “There could be
a
lot
of
damage. I’d shove in
the wedge if
1
were you.”
The policeman knelt and grasped the man’s head. He
tried to thrust the wedge into the frothing mouth, but
the man’s convulsions kept throwing the policeman
off.
The policeman looked up at Ronald. “Would you
mind trying to get his boots off, then, Sir?”
“I
doubt if
I
can do it,” Ronald said. He was greatly
agitated, for if there was one thing he did not like to
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1995

EPILEPSY
IN
LITERATURE
S1.5
see it was another epileptic. The thought of touching
the man horrified him. “Matthew!” he called out.
“Come and lend
a
hand.”
Matthew approached and,
as
Ronald instructed,
threw himself upon the man’s jerking knees. The
po-
liceman jammed the wedge between the teeth. Ron-
ald felt for the shoes as one thrusting his hand into
flames. He shut his eyes, and felt for the laces, loos-
ened them, threw the shoes aside
so
violently that
one of them nearly hit an onlooker, and sprang back
from the kicking figure.
The man was still jerking when the ambulance ar-
rived, and he was lifted up by two men in hospital
uniform and taken away.
Whereas Collins in
Poor iMiss Finch
was sympa-
thetic but unemotional, brief, and close to the facts
in his description, even instructive about how to
deal correctly with
a
convulsive seizure, the above
example is highly emotional, exaggerated, and of-
fers wrong advice. It is from Muriel Spark’s
The
Bachelors
(1960), and a novel with
a
leading char-
acter who
has
epilepsy and is experiencing a grow-
ing
isolation brought on by a slow change of attitude
toward him by his friends and acquaintances and by
the restrictions which the possibility of having
a
seizure at any moment imposes on his daily life. It
is
written with much insight and empathy, and
seems to be drawn from life. It was a great surprise
for me to learn from the author that she never knew
a person with epilepsy. Her starting point was
a
seizure which she had happened to observe in the
street and which her memory had increased in
drama. Spark’s objective was highly humane: to
imagine the life conditions of
a
person whom she
had perceived in a convulsion, and in this she was
highly successful.
In two other novels, the epilepsy motive is based
on personal experience, and in both instances these
experiences are much more intimate than those of
Spark. Penelope Farmer is the wife of a prominent
British epileptologist and shared his involvement in
a field project on epilepsy epidemiology and care in
Ecuador. Her novel
Snakes and Ladders
(1993) is
based on this experience and is fascinating reading
for epileptologists with
a
literary taste because they
will
be able to follow the author’s unfolding of fact
from fiction.
The other novel is
Owls
Do
Cry
(1959) by Janet
Frame,
a
New Zealander who qualifies for inclusion
in this article because she has been
a
patient at the
Maudsley and talks very favorably of the experi-
ence in the last part of her autobiography,
The En-
voy from Mirror City
(1984). Although not an auto-
biographical work,
Owls
Do
Cry
is built on many
motives from her childhood, and the epileptic boy
in it, Toby, is depicted after her own brother whose
epilepsy, and its consequences for the family life,
are reported in her autobiography. In neither book
does she give
a
description of the seizures, but it is
of great interest that they are at once perceived by
the family as an incurable disease, which does not
keep the father from suspecting
a
lack of good will
in the boy nor the whole family from
a
constant
search for all kinds of magic cures. The time is the
mid-l920s, and bromide is the only drug given. The
mother gets rid of the medicine in the sink, but the
boy later learns to take it, and obtains his driver’s
license. In the novel, the experience of the aura is
described in
a
poetic, metaphoric way (8).
When he was sick his hand shook as if it felt cold and
then
a
dark cloak would be thrown over his head by
Jesus or God, and he would struggle inside the cloak,
pushing
at
the velvet folds, waving his arms and legs
in the air till the sun took pity, descending in
a
daz-
zling crane of light to haul, but, alas, preserve, where
in all the sky, Toby wondered, this cloak of stifling
recurring dream.
Another work concerning
a
person who is at least
believed to have suffered from epilepsy is Julian
Barnes’
Flaubert’s Parrot
(1984). Barnes’ book
could be called an alternative project to
a
biogra-
phy, and is highly enjoyable reading. Although it
does not question Flaubert’s epilepsy diagnosis
(which someone should do because it seems to be
dubious), Barnes must have the credit of not having
introduced prejudices about epilepsy in his treat-
ment of the subject.
Not everyone can receive credit for a fair presen-
tation of epilepsy, and some recent best-selling
writers cannot.
PREJUDICES
AND
DRAMA
Rosamund Pilcher presents Danus, the amiable
and eligible young man in
The
Shell
Seekers
(1987)
in
a
mysterious seclusiveness that seems out of
character and turns out to be due to his fear of
having epilepsy. Relief comes when the suspicion
turns out to have been wrong. The plot is unfortu-
nate because for the hero’s trouble to seem great,
the possible diagnosis must appear
as
the worst of
disasters, and all the prejudices about epilepsy are
manifest. Danus copes well enough with not being
allowed to have alcohol or to drive
a
car, but in-
stead of finishing his law studies,
a
gardener’s
helper is the only job open for him; the possibility of
marriage is out
of
the question
as a
matter
of
course.
Joan Aiken
is
worse. Why she, in
The Weeping
Ash
(1980) has the brother of one of her two con-
trasting heroines have epilepsy has remained
a
mys-
tery to me. It contributes neither to the plot nor the
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S16
P.
WOLF
character, but there is no plot to speak of anyway,
and the characters are one-dimensional. The silly
young man is supposed to be a poet, walks with his
head in the clouds, sleeps with his sister by mistake,
and dies by mistake. Aiken believes that personality
traits such as daydreaming, moodiness, or swings
between high activity and apathy are typical enough
to suffice for a diagnosis of “the falling sickness,”
and even indicate a disposition to epilepsy before
the manifestation of the first seizure.
A few other popular novels have epilepsy
themes. One,
Green City in the Sun
(1988)
by Bar-
bara Wood, is a voluminous novel which tells the
story of Kenya from the perspective of a fictitious
British planter’s family. A son develops epileptic
seizures at age
7.
The father considers this as an
indication of insanity and brings his son to “every
specialist in London” who, however, seem to know
no better than to treat him with bromides. Before
ever becoming an important character in the book,
the boy is killed in a race riot in Nairobi. Apart from
characterizing the boy as weak and sickly, the epi-
lepsy serves no specific function in the book apart
from creating one very dramatic scene in which he
has his first seizure in the presence of his deeply
shocked parents.
Green City in the Sun
is written in
a sequence of relatively short chapters, all of equal
length, and all comprising scenes that can be well
visualized. It was probably written with a prospect
of its use in a television series, and the seizure may
have been added to create a dramatic scene.
A seizure as a challenge to the actors in a soap
opera may be an unusual motive for epilepsy in
fic-
tion, but one additional work presumably has such
intentions:
The Rich are Different
(1977)
by Susan
Howatch. In this English-American novel, there is
hereditary epilepsy in the family of one of the lead-
ing characters, the American magnate Paul van
Zale. He had himself seizures as a child, but suc-
cessfully fought the disease with rigorous exercise
and sports. Once in a while, he takes
a
few capsules
of
phenobarbital. His seizures return when his wife
confronts him after discovering his infidelity. Be-
sides making him impotent, the seizures represent a
great danger to his position in the world of big busi-
ness because it will be used against him by his en-
emies should it become known to them. Epilepsy
here is viewed predominantly as a social stigma,
medical care is practically nonexistent, and the sei-
zures are considered dependent on emotions and
stress.
Whereas the psychogenesis of seizures, already
referred to by Dickens and Thackeray, is still under
scientific debate, it is a central feature of epilepsy
for Wood, Howatch, Aiken, and many other au-
thors of fiction. This apparently reflects a popular
and widespread assumption.
PROPHECY AND DIVINITY
The last works to be mentioned lead back to an
ancient layer in the perception of epilepsy which
relates it to prophecy and divinity and which was
briefly touched on in the discussion of
Silas
Marner.
In Salman Rushdie’s
Midnight’s Children
(1981),
a dubious figure on a roof in Delhi prophesizes the
main character’s future in an ecstasy in which he
speaks in sybillinic verses, which later all come
true. The trance ends with his collapsing in
a
con-
vulsive seizure. An important character in Rush-
die’s
The Satanic Verses
(1988)
is the false prophet
Ayesha who leads a whole village on a mad pilgrim-
age that ends with all of them walking into the Red
Sea and drowning. Ayesha has “the falling sick-
ness” and is “possessed by the demon of epi-
lepsy.” She is called a demon herself, but also a
seer and prophetess.
Many great historical figures have been sus-
pected of having had epilepsy, often on very dubi-
ous
grounds, and Rushdie’s narrative relates to
such speculations concerning the prophet Moham-
med. These were also shared by Dostoyevsky, who
compared his own ecstatic aura with
a
mystic ex-
perience of Mohammed. For Dostoyevsky, this was
an experience of highest importance and deep reli-
gious significance
(Sll).
He wrote
The Idiot
with
the intention of creating an all-good, Jesus-like fig-
ure which then became the epileptic Prince Mysh-
kin, whose seizures resemble Dostoyevsky’s own.
The central character in
La Storia
(1974)
by Elsa
Morante, an important Italian novelist, is a small
boy with epilepsy who has many of the legendary
traits of the divine child
(12,13).
Another such child
is born in
The Children of Men
(1992)
by
P.
D.
James. Her story takes place in England in the year
2021, 25
years after all mankind has lost its fertility.
The novel describes a society and its autocratic
government, which try to cope with the threat of
slowly dying out. A group of dissidents use the
early Christian symbol of the fish, and one of them,
a young woman with a congenitally deformed hand,
surprisingly becomes pregnant. From eugenic con-
siderations, neither she nor the child’s father,
a
priest who had epilepsy as a young man, had been
tested like everyone else for reoccurrence of fertil-
ity. Now, the crippled woman and her future pos-
sibly epileptic child bear the hopes of mankind and
are spared, whereas all the other dissidents are
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EPILEPSY
IN
LITERATURE
S17
killed. The ruler, another Herod, attempts to cap-
ture the newborn boy, who first sees the light of day
in a woodshed. Dr. Faron, a former government
councillor who kills the tyrant in
a
final showdown
is the Joseph figure who completes the Christmas
setting.
PHYSICIANS AND EPILEPSY IN FICTION
It is interesting that contemporary authors return
to such ancient, mythological conjectures about ep-
ilepsy at a time of great advances in its care and
cure. Do such conjectures provide a necessary
counterweight to the medical progress in epileptol-
ogy which people find too abstract to be grasped
and felt? This would be a radical change as com-
pared with Collins, who acquainted his readers with
new medical results and could count on their being
interested. His book also is the last in the series
presented here which depicts a physician as both
amiable and competent; doctors in many current
books appear distant and often helpless when con-
fronted with epilepsy. They explain very little, if
anything at all, and write a prescription which the
patient does not follow as a matter of course.
Is
this
perhaps the patients’ aspect of “noncompliance”?
I
am afraid that this image of contemporary phy-
sicians dealing with epilepsy may not be altogether
false and may indicate where patients needs are not
sufficiently met today. To educate doctors and en-
able them to provide competent and comprehensive
care, the ultimate goal of the Institute, whose
launch is commemorated in this supplement, is the
best remedy for such defects.
REFERENCES
1.
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Epilepsia,
Vol.
36,
Suppl.
1,
1995