De epilepsia disputatio

I.
Epilepsy is a frequent and dangerous malady, about whose causes, manner of generation, and location, not everyone has taught the same.

II.
Therefore, I judged that I would be doing a worthwhile service if I were to institute a disputation concerning it, and show in a few chapters what true opinion regarding this matter seems to me to be.
Concerning the various names of this disease.

III.
There are many names, both among the Greeks and the Latins, for this disease, usually derived from the symptoms, or the location, or the efficient cause, or from its magnitude, or from those who are most frequently accustomed to being seized by it: for because antiquity did not yet know the true causes of diseases, it could not find their proper names either.

IIII.
The Greeks all called it epilepsian epilepsy, from epilambanesthai to take hold of, because it leaps upon the sick unexpectedly and, seizing their senses and mind, as Aurelian says, it as it were strikes them down.

V.
Some have pronounced it hieran noson sacred disease: not, as impostors claimed, because it is sent uniquely by the Gods and is more divine and sacred than other diseases, as Hippocrates rightly warns in his book on the sacred disease. For it possesses a nature and a cause, just as other diseases do, from which it arises.

VI.
But it is called this either because of its magnitude and gravity: for it is familiar to the Greeks to use hieron sacred to signify "great": just as they use "sacred bone" and "sacred fish" to signify a large bone and a large fish. And Virgil, in Greek imitation, spoke of "sacred hunger for gold" to mean "great" hunger. And from this it is that Hippocrates calls it megalen noson the great disease, and Cornelius Celsus calls it the "greater" one, which our people have also imitated.