In the "Discovery of the Day", the Epilepsy Museum presents one of the "1,000 Names" given to epilepsy and provides information on a type of therapy which people used in the past in an attempt to treat the disease. This information is changed daily on a rotational basis.

Historic Treatment of the Day

Many attempts to treat epilepsy in the past show the fear, repulsion, but also helplessness which people felt when confronted with this disease.

Epilepsy is the disease of 1,000 names. Names of illnesses - especially those in the vernacular - can help us to make many conclusions about how the illnesses were regarded in the past:

They point to what people assumed to be the cause of a disease, to the subjective suffering of the sick person, to the social effects which a disease had, and not least to the world view of the people who gave the disease its name. In addition to this, such names can also point to the medical knowledge of a certain era, to sociological facts and to religious and cultural features of the age.

Unusual Epilepsy "Treatment" of the Day

Epilepsy Name of the Day

 H. Schneble: Krankheit der ungezählten Namen, Huber-Verlag 1987