On the Sacred DiseaseHippocrates

On the Sacred Disease is a Hippocratic treatise, written around 400 BC, on epilepsy and related seizures. The author opens by denying that the disease is any more divine or sacred than other diseases. It has a natural cause. Men call it sacred from inexperience and from wonder at its strange appearance. The purifiers and charlatans who treat it with charms and purifications are attacked as impious: they claim a god pollutes the body, and they invent a different deity for each form of the attack.

The natural explanation is humoral and cerebral. The brain is the seat of the disease. Phlegm, accumulating and descending into the vessels, produces the choking, foaming, loss of speech, and convulsions that observers call sacred. The author describes the brain as double, divided by a membrane, and connected by vessels to the rest of the body. Young children often die of the attacks because their vessels are narrow; older people more often survive. Those who feel an onset coming withdraw from the crowd out of shame, not out of fear of a god. The treatise ends by giving the brain the greatest power over man among the bodily parts, a clear statement of the cephalocentric view in Greek medicine. The work is a founding document of naturalistic pathology: the same disease that tradition handed to the gods is returned to anatomy, humor, and observable process.