Human beings have long suffered from this neurological disorder hallmarked by sudden seizures. For example, Babylonian and Aryurvedic texts dating from at least 1500 B.C. record many of the different types of epileptic seizures recognized and treated today. In antiquity, most physicians ascribed their cause to a supernatural force. Whether a deity or a demon, epilepsy was long referred to as the "sacred disease."
As early as 400 B.C., the Greek physician Hippocrates not only described the illness perfectly; he also challenged its godly distinction. No more sacred than any other malady, he argued, the falling sickness was seated in the brain and caused by an imbalance of the humors.
The word epilepsy is derived from the Greek verb epilambanem, which means "to take hold of or to seize." Converted to the Latin epilepsia and later the Old French, epilepsie, late 14th-century English medical texts occasionally referred to the disease as epilensia or epilence. But most English speakers of this era still referred to the disorder as "the falling sickness." Things began to change in 1578, when British botanist Henry Lyte translated Flemish physician Rembert Dodoens’ famous herbal text, Cruydeboek. In the section describing remedies for falling sickness, Lyte showed a clear preference for the term epilepsy.
Still, adoption into the vernacular and along the Rialto took some time. For example, early in the first act of the William Shakespeare’s 1599 play, Julius Caesar, Cassius tells Brutus about a debilitating seizure Caesar had recently experienced. When recounting the episode of severe body shaking, glassy eyes, and strange mouth movements, Cassius declares that Caesar was as weak "as a sick girl" because "he hath the falling sickness." (Act 1, scene 2, lines, 121-23).
By 1603-4, however, the Bard famously portrayed a raging and mouth-foaming Othello as having "fallen into an epilepsy." In King Lear, which was written the following year (1604-5), Kent curses Oswald: "A plague upon your epileptic visage." (Act 2, scene 2, line 79)
As Shakespeare went, so often followed the English language. Today, only historians utter epilepsy's earlier, stumbling names.
Long stigmatized as a form of madness or a weakness of both body and character, we now know that epilepsy is really a group of disorders caused by abnormal firing of the neurons. Which portion of the brain is affected and how (e.g., predisposing conditions, brain trauma or injuries, tumors, metabolic diseases, etc.) determines the type of seizure one experiences.
More than 50 million people living today have an epilepsy disorder and, in areas where medical care is available, most are well treated by modern medical therapies.