EPILEPSY: A PAROXYSMAL CEREBRAL DYSRHYTHMIA

Abstract

Diseases change their names with increase, not of age (like Chinese children), but with increase of medical knowledge. Most disorders begin life bearing the name of the man who first recognized them or else they are temporarily tagged with some purely descriptive term. When the aetiology or pathology is discovered, the nomenclature is changed. Thus, consumption has become tuberculosis; locomotor ataxia has become tabes dorsalis; and palpitation of the heart has been classified into various disorders of cardiac rhythm as paroxysmal tachycardia, auricular fibrillation, c it is a paroxysmal cerebral dysrhythmia. This discovery places the study and understanding of epilepsy on a different and deeper level and requires a reorientation of our thinking. We say ‘‘a dysrhythmia,’’ because epilepsy is only one of many. For example, periodic breathing called ‘‘Cheyne–Stokes’’ respiration, is but the muscular registration of a medullary rhythm which is alternately slow and fast. Heart, viscera, endocrine glands, all have rhythms normal and abnormal. We have presented elsewhere details of observations [1–4] and certain interpretations of results [5,6]. At this time we shall review in brief outline seven new facts about epilepsy which we have gained in the last two and a half years by means of electro-encephalography. In this period we have made records of about 400 epileptic patients, examining many of them repeatedly. Of these patients, 120 had from one to hundreds of seizures while connected with the apparatus. With the exception of the pioneer observations of Berger, who published records of abnormal rhythm which occurred during seizures (fact one of our list), we believe the observations which we have presented, or now present, are new.