Page:Greek Biology and Medicine.djvu/46

 GREEK BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE epilepsy, which commonly was regarded as a stroke or visitation of a god or demon. But, says the writer, " it appears to me to be nowise more divine nor more sacred than other dis- -,-yi eases, but has a natural cause from which it originates like other affections. Men regard its nature and cause as divine from ignorance and wonder, because it is not at all like to other diseases. And this notion of its divinity is kept up by their inability to comprehend it, and the simplicity of the mode by which it is treated, for men are freed from it by purifications and incantations. But if it is reckoned divine be- cause it is wonderful, instead of one there are many diseases which would be sacred; for, as I will show, there are others no less wonderful and prodigious, which nobody imagines to be sacred. The quotidian, tertian and quartan fevers seem to me no less sacred and divine in their origin than this disease, though they are not reckoned so wonderful. And I see men be- come mad and demented from no manifest cause. . . . They who first referred this disease [epilepsy] to the gods, appear to me to have been just such persons as the conjurers, purifi- cators, mountebanks, and charlatans now are, who give themselves out for being excessively [24]