Page:In Spite of Epilepsy, Woods, 1913.djvu/24

18 paradox, on the part of the medical as well as lay community who brand all epileptics as derelicts, because he personally knows many epileptics who do their useful life work with credit to themselves and benefit to the community. Because a man occasionally responds by a few minutes of unconsciousness or convulsions to certain known or unknown or but vaguely conjectured causes, just as others respond by headache, neuralgia, rheumatism, and the like, to certain undiscovered or but conjectured condition, is no reason why the one should be regarded with almost superstitious awe and alarm, looked upon askance, discouraged out of the sunlight of beneficent work into retirement and inactivity, compelled to live under a timid assumption of health, for fear of eliciting antagonism and terror, while the other, the man, for example, with a three or four hour attack of incapacitating headache every week, may declare his condition without fear of compromising himself. If he does not declare his condition with the expectation of polite sympathy he may at least do so with impunity. The fact is that the person with periodic headache ought to be the one to hesitate about hazarding publicity, because his sickness may be the result of avoidable indiscretion or excess. His headache, like dyspepsia, may be but the remorse of a guilty stomach, while epilepsy is not always avoidable, because it is often due to—we know not what. In some cases one no more unfits a man for duty than the other.

This statement, we are aware, is likely to be