Page:In Spite of Epilepsy, Woods, 1913.djvu/37

Rh vulsions. Although he averaged eight convulsions a month, we recommended his being returned to school and being put merely on a controlled diet, with treatment to counteract dietary and other errors. The result was that the patient skipped a whole division in his studies and has had but one convulsion since he came to us, which was due to dietary disobedience. He was admitted last September into the Southern Manual Training School without examination, and although absent three weeks because of other sickness, he received, as may be shown, the following certificate: "English, Latin, History, Algebra, German, Science, Constructive Drawing, Free-hand Drawing, Joining, Tinsmithing, Penmanship, Commercial Arithmetic,—satisfactory in every respect."

This boy, six feet two inches tall, in his eighteenth year, who has now gone four years and six months without convulsions or other signs of epilepsy, has escaped forever being discouraged by sympathetic friends into perpetual ignorance and uselessness, which is the next thing to if not worse than death.

It is because of the lack of proper management rather than of medication that the ordinary reflex convulsions of childhood and adolescence sometimes develop into epilepsy. Skillful hygienic and psychic surveillance of such children without much medicine would often prevent such patients from acquiring the epileptic habit, for it does sometimes appear as an acquired habit, especially in cases of high-strung hysterical persons. Again it may be intercurrent; that is to