Page:In Spite of Epilepsy, Woods, 1913.djvu/36

30 daily for many years, and during the time he was undergoing care at our hands insisted on taking up as an occupation the "breaking" of wild western horses, a practice that he followed, as Cæsar did horseback riding, without accident. For the last four years this gentleman, unlike Cæsar, has given up both epilepsy and horse-training.

It was Cæsar, too,—for his genius was inventive as well as military,—who first wrote personal letters to people living in the same city, in order to expedite business, thus avoiding the ordinary flippancies and other impedimenta of personal interview.

The reader, we trust, will excuse these prolixities. They seem to us necessary in order to exhibit the activity even in minutiæ of unimpaired faculty running parallel with a serious nervous disease, and also to show that heroism and a life of toil, hardship, and multifarious accomplishments are not inconsistent with uncomplicated epilepsy, or even with epilepsy complicated with other diseases as this was. It is necessary, too, to give details in order to be in a position to encourage epileptics, even when they cannot be altogether cured, to feel that it may be possible in spite of their handicap to outstrip in usefulness those who started with them in the race of life.

We have in our possession the school certificate of a boy who four years ago was sent to us by a brother physician as a "nervous wreck." His condition was due as much to enforced idleness, exemption from study, and artificially engendered fear as it was to