Author Description

"The written history of epilepsy goes back 3000 years with accurate descriptions of epileptic phenomena appearing in the writings of ancient Mesopotamia and the Indian Ayurvedic texts. Although physicians of the Hippocratic school in Greece, about 400 BC, understood that epileptic seizures originated in the brain, as did Galen several hundred years later, epilepsy was generally viewed as a mysterious condition attributed to supernatural causes, at least in the West, until the mid nineteenth century. At that time, the nascent disciplines of basic neuroscience and clinical neurology defined a variety of ictal manifestations, including focal seizures and absences, and recognized them as part of a constellation of disorders referred to as epilepsy. In particular, postmortem clinical pathological correlations not only revealed specific anatomic substrates for different ictal manifestations, but led directly to concepts of localization of function within the human brain, and to surgical treatment for certain types of focal epilepsies. The development of radiology in the twentieth century further improved physicians' abilities to identify "invisible" lesions as responsible for epileptic seizures in some patients, but it was application of the electroencephalogram (EEG), and the subsequent field of both clinical and basic electrophysiology, that provided a means to begin classifying and characterizing different types of epileptic seizures and epilepsy syndromes, and investigating their underlying fundamental pathophysiological neuronal mechanisms"--