In 2009, the International League against Epilepsy celebrated a milestone, the centenary of its inauguration. Nonetheless, it is still a relative newcomer in the 3000 year saga of recorded human epilepsy (Temkin, 1971), and one may wonder why the League should have appeared when it did, what its purpose was and what it has achieved? Over much of the past three millennia, epilepsy has been interpreted either as the result of supernatural interventions of various kinds or as a medical illness whose scientific basis was elusive. Until relatively recently, generalized tonic–clonic convulsive seizures were regarded as the essential manifestation of epilepsy, although minor, non-convulsive or locally convulsive phenomena, sometimes associated with generalized convulsive seizures, were known. Such seizures nearly always occur unpredictably, usually suddenly, have spectacular manifestations and cause temporary yet total interruption of consciousness and loss of bodily function control. It is easy to understand why such phenomena would seem to observers as fearful and disgusting events imposed on unwilling sufferers by extrinsic supernatural agencies, and why the sufferer would often be regarded with suspicion and repulsion rather than with sympathy. From such a background, the present-day scientific understanding of epilepsy had to emerge, slowly. The first assertion that epilepsy was ‘a disease like any other’, and not of supernatural origin, appeared in the Hippocratic writing On the sacred disease , dating from ca .400 BC. The Hippocratic author ingeniously explained the pathogenesis of seizures in terms of cold phlegm from the brain suddenly entering the veins and obstructing the ‘pneuma’, a set of concepts quite foreign to present day thought. In the second century AD, Galen attempted another primitive scientific interpretation of the pathogenesis of convulsive seizures, based on the idea that cerebral function resided in the cavities of the brain's ventricular system. He attributed seizures to a …