COLUMBIA LIBRARIES OFFSITE HEALTH SCIENCES STANDARD HX641 25009 RC395 .W86 in spite of epilepsy Gii pjiJfrug[?ui3rr5iiniH]fiuilR^ I i i I 1 i 1 1 1 i i THE LIBRARIES COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY HEALTH SCIENCES LIBRARY i 1 I 1 1 1 1 1 i Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2010 with funding from Open Knowledge Commons http://www.archive.org/details/inspiteofepilepsOOwood IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY OTHER WORKS ON EPILEPSY By DR. WOODS WAS THE APOSTLE PAUL AN EPILEPTIC? $1.25 by mail. THE TREATMENT OF EPILEPSY ACCORDING TO THE METHOD SUGGESTED BY PROF. FELIX VON NIE- MEYER. Read before the American Medical Association in Philadelphia and published in the Journal of the Ameri- can Medical Association, Chicago. HISTORY OF A CASE OF EPILEPSY OF 52 YEARS' DURATION, WITH TWENTY-EIGHT THOUSAND CONVULSIONS; RECOVERY. Read in the Academy of Medicine, New York, before the National Association for the Study of Epilepsy and the Care and Treatment of Epi- leptics and published in The Monthly Cyclopedia of Practical Medicine, Philadelphia, Pa. ALCOHOLISM IN THE PARENT AS A FACTOR IN THE PRODUCTION OF EPILEPSY IN THE CHILD. Read by request before the American Society for the Study of Alcohol and Other Drug Narcotics at Atlantic City, 1910, and printed by the United States Government under the title, " Some Scientific Conclusions Concerning the Alcohol Problem and its Practical Relation to Life." THE USE AND A FEW OF THE ABUSES OF THE BRO- MIDES IN THE TREATMENT OF EPILEPSY. Read before the National Association for the Study of Epilepsy at New Haven, Connecticut, and printed in the Pennsylvania Medical Journal, June, 1907. OPERATIVE PROCEDURE AS A THERAPEUTIC MEAS- URE IN THE CURE OF EPILEPSY. Read before the National Association at Richmond, Va., and printed in the Journal of the American Medical Association, February 29, 1908. ON THE MANAGEMENT OF EPILEPSY. Written by re- quest for The Cyclopedia of Practical Medicine. HOME TREATMENT OF EPILEPSY AS CONTRASTED WITH INSTITUTIONAL TREAMENT. Illustrated with exhibition of thirteen cases cured, read in the Section of Medicine, Medical Society of the State of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia Session, 1909, and printed in Pennsylvania Medical Journal, 1910. ETIOLOGY AND TREATMENT OF EPILEPSY. Illus- trated with 18 patients who before treatment averaged from 4 to 28 convulsions monthly and who had gone from two to sixteen years without convulsions and without treatment. Read before the South Branch of the Philadelphia County Medical Society. THE INDUSTRIAL STATUS OF EPILEPSY. Read by title before the National Association for the Study of Epilepsy; reprinted from The Cyclopedia of Practical Medicine, May, 1912. RELATION OF ALCOHOLISM TO EPILEPSY. Read in the Section of Hygiene and Sanitary Science at the Fifty- seventh Annual Session of the American Medical Associa- tion, Boston, 1906, and printed in the Journal of the Atneri- can Medical Association, Feb. 9, 1909, vol. xlviii. OTHER BOOKS BY DR. WOODS DIVORCE. Being a defence of the American People against the charge of moral deterioration. $1.35 by mail. RAMBLES OF A PHYSICIAN; OR, A MIDSUMMER DREAM. Being a record of travel with unique experiences through Ireland, Scotland, England, Holland, Belgium, Ger- many, Hungary, Bohemia, Italy, Switzerland, and France. Tenth thousand. 2 vols., $3.00 by mail. IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY Being a Review of the Lives of Three Great Epileptics, — Julius Caesar, Mohammed, Lord Byron,— the Foun- ders Respectively of an Empire, a Religion, and a School of Poetry BY MATTHEW WOODS, M.D. Member of the American Medical Association, The Phila- delphia Psychiatric Society and The National Associa- tion/or the Study of Epilepsy and the Care and Treatment of Epileptics NEW YORK THE COSMOPOLITAN PRESS 1913 vv Copyright, 1913, by THE COSMOPOLITAN PRESS Q en TO MRS. FLORENCE EARLE COAXES As generous as a woman and as inspiring as a poet as she is discriminating in hero- worship, this appreciation of "the noblest man that ever lived in the tides of time' * is dedicated by her friend, The Author CONTENTS PAGE Julius C^sar :.: . . 17 Mohammed (^y Lord Byron 191 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Caius Julius C^sar Frontispiece FACING page Caius Julius Cesar This contemporary portrait of Caesar, for which in all probability he sat, is very interesting because it unmis- takably exhibits the Fades Epilepticus. The original is in the Museum of Naples 40 Mohammed This is merely one of the many ideal conceptions of Mohammed 126 Lord Byron This also shows the Fades Epilepticus (the Epileptic face) that can not always be described but is so evident to the expert 190 Lady Byron Byron's wife, Anna Isabella Milbanke, the only daugh- ter of Ralph Milbanke (afterward Noel) and mother of Ada, afterward the Countess of Lovelace, Byron's only legitimate child. After Lady Byron's separation from her husband she became the Baroness of Wentworth. She was a woman of superior talent and a nice taste in letters and with a life dedicated to good works . . 208 Miss Chaworth " The Heiress of Annesley," perhaps Byron's first sweetheart. Byron's uncle, whose heir he was, killed Miss Chaworth's father in a duel, one of the conditions of which was that the combatants were to be locked up together in a dark room. This uncle was afterward tried for manslaughter and found guilty, but took ad- vantage of his position as a peer to escape the death penalty 220 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS FACING The Countess Guiccioli page The Countess Teresa Gamba Guiccioli, lent by her husband to Lord Byron during his residence in Italy. This thrifty nobleman even rented to the pair sumptu- ous apartments in his palace. During the time of their living together in Byron's villa at La Mira, outside of Venice, the Count wrote a letter to his young wife ask- ing her to try to persuade Byron to lend him i,ooo pounds at 5 per cent. Instead of thirsting for the blood of his wife's betrayer — some say Byron was not the tempter — he only longed for a little of the English- man's money. Finally the husband mustered up cour- age enough to run away with his own wife, to Byron's great delight. Her book about Byron extols him as a combination of saint and demigod 230 Margarita Cogni The " Amazonian " heroine of Castellar's " Lord By- ron"; one of the "noble Lord's" many Italian victims. " Her passions," says the extravagant Spaniard, " were as ardent as a giant volcano in eruption " . . . . 236 The Rt. Hon. Lady Caroline Lamb The " eccentric " Lady Caroline Lamb, — the Mrs. Felix Lorraine of "Vivian Gray," the Lady Monteagle of " Venetia," figuring also in Mrs. Humphry Ward's "William Ashe," — daughter of the Earl of Bessbor- ough, the wife of the amiable William Lamb, afterward Lord Melbourne. She infatuated Byron for a season. When he finally cast her off she became his most whim- sical enemy , , 246 PREFACE These desultory sketches, made up of material gathered from many sources, have been written for the purpose of convincing the medical profession, the great army of discouraged epileptics, and the laity, — since everybody now seems to study at least the vaga- ries of medicine, — that uncomplicated epilepsy and sometimes, too, epilepsy complicated with other neuroses, as in the case of Lord Byron, is not incon- consistent with a life of utility, nor even an important career. Besides the great names mentioned in the sub-title of this book, a number of other persons in various de- partments of useful endeavor, from the most difficult to the least complicated, have succeeded in spite of epilepsy. The writer during twenty-five years of special prac- tice in this disease and its various causes has had on his consultation list, among numerous others in every walk of life, a governor of a conspicuous State, a mayor of a great city, a senator, and two members of congress, none of w^hom allowed their malady to stand in the way of political or civic advancement. He has also had under professional care college professors; literary workers; school-teachers; three xiii PREFACE clergymen, one of them brilliant as scholar and orator, the others successful as pastors, and an author of pro- found and witty books — two of them popular enough to have been translated into foreign tongues. Among his patients have been affluent business men, musicians, organists, and other instrumental soloists, commanding leading positions and public applause. Some of them have been entirely cured. In others suspension of convulsions and all symptoms of the dis- ease entirely subsided during a treatment that was so mild as to be only beneficially felt. And all, even the worst, with a few exceptions, were helped. The critical reader may remember that these sim- ple outlines, not pretending to the dignity of finished portraits of these eminent men, — Caesar, Mohammed, Byron, never before recognized in detail and definitely as epileptics, — were written during snatched intervals between the consultations of a busy practitioner, more deeply interested in the cure of the sick than in the writing of biographies. Much of the work was done while patients were assembling in his reception room. If he had had more leisure, the descriptions would have been shorter, — since even manufactured brevity may be the soul of wit. The sentences would have been turned with nicer felicity, and more attention would have been given to the elegancies of literary polish, and as a matter of mere phraseological me- chanics, a more careful dove-tailing of episode, allu- sion, and pathologic hint would have been made. xiv PREFACE But just as they are he trusts they may have the effect of turning the minds of the laity to a more hope- ful estimate of this class of sufferers. He hopes, too, that his professional brethren, who honor him by read- ing the book, will accept the fact that in spite of gen- eral professional incredulity many epileptics can be cured, that nearly all may be helped, that frequently seizures may be almost indefinitely averted and the patient restored to useful occupation, and that even in the most trying and inveterate cases it is better to persevere in hopefulness than to surrender in despair. Matthew Woods. Philadelphia, Pa., February lo, ipij* XV IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY JULIUS CiESAR CHAPTER I The presentation of these characterizations is in- tended as a protest against the popular view regard- ing the epileptic : namely, — that he is either a man no longer in the race, or by reason of physical limitations necessarily relegated to the limbo of suspended useful- ness, a mere tolerated evil, because of his infirmity, hopelessly incapable of taking care of himself, and sooner or later, unless the inheritor of adequate for- tune, bound to become a burden upon the State. The fallacy of this as an all-comprehending theory has been demonstrated by history again and again. For all epileptics have not only not been burdens upon the State or the family, but to the contrary, by the mere might of great and varied capacity, just as the unafflicted, some of them have created and maintained States, conquered nations, established systems of re- ligion, and painted masterful pictures. They have also been prominent in literary epochs, and have oc- cupied high positions in many of the other walks of life. This, we admit, is not the rule; but it has oc- curred frequently enough to limit at least the plenary infallibility of the popular opinion. The author is convinced of the injustice of this tacit declaration, if he may be allowed the use of 17 i8 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY paradox, on the part of the medical as well as lay com- munity who brand all epileptics as derelicts, because he personally knows many epileptics who do their use- ful life work with credit to themselves and benefit to the community. Because a man occasionally responds by a few minutes of unconsciousness or convulsions to certain known or unknown or but vaguely con- jectured causes, just as others respond by headache, neuralgia, rheumatism, and the like, to certain un- discovered or but conjectured condition, is no reason why the one should be regarded with almost super- stitious awe and alarm, looked upon askance, discour- aged out of the sunlight of beneficent work into re- tirement and inactivity, compelled to live under a timid assumption of health, for fear of eliciting an- tagonism and terror, while the other, the man, for example, with a three or four hour attack of incapaci- tating headache every week, may declare his con- dition without fear of compromising himself. If he does not declare his condition with the expectation of polite sympathy he may at least do so with im- punity. The fact is that the person with periodic headache ought to be the one to hesitate about hazard- ing publicity, because his sickness may be the result of avoidable indiscretion or excess. His headache, like dyspepsia, may be but the remorse of a guilty stomach, while epilepsy is not always avoidable, because it is often due to — we know not what. In some cases one no more unfits a man for duty than the other. This statement, we are aware, is likely to be ac- JULIUS C^SAR 19 cepted with a shrug of incredulity, but it is never- theless true. We believe the time may come, because of a higher state of hygienic enlightenment, when every acquired or created disease will be regarded as a disgrace in- stead of as it sometimes is now, — a thing to conjure with, an assumed state, put on at times, as you put on a garment of occasion, to elicit interest or as a cover for the breaking of an engagement or the neglect of a duty. So much are we convinced of the immorality of many of our common ailments that in regard to at least one of them, — smallpox, — we have been teach- ing for years that the sane adult who allows himself or his children to contract such an easily prevented ailment as this is by vaccination, instead of receiving sympathy, ought to be put in jail. But to return to the subject. Many of us now and then encounter epileptics who make independent liv- ings, occupy positions of trust, teach in schools and colleges, support families, manage estates, and the like, as well as occupy the minor places of life, without com- promising themselves or slighting their employment. One of the best wood-carvers we have ever known, — a man who did original work for the big architects, supporting a wife and three children, — was an epi- leptic from boyhood. Another attained the position of governor of a State. Another held an impor- tant legal position in a large city, was a prominent lawyer, carrying difficult cases to successful issues. Another was a clergyman of powerful intellect and 20 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY convincing eloquence. Another was a voluminous author, with some of his books translated into for- eign tongues. One of the worst examples we have ever known to get well, a man who in fifty years had had twenty-eight thousand convulsions, besides nu- merous psychic attacks, managed his own ample estate and his home with prudence. This of course was very exceptional as was also his complete cure. It would be possible, we imagine, for many of us to select from our own case-books, — especially if we followed our patients into their private lives, — illus- trations just as interesting. And if it were not for the misery-producing bias against fits we could give names of persons who in spite of epilepsy were ef- ficient in various vocations. Many distempers are objects of sympathetic con- cern in these tolerant days, when everybody seems interested in the study of medicine. Yet, notwith- standing the fact of the great multitude of medical amateurs, if a man happens to be a victim of the malady that has been contemporary with all ages, if mentioned at all, it is only under the breath, just as in the days of rampant superstition when to be an epilep- tic was to be possessed of demons. Still, although a man be dead, because of this prejudice it is not well even then to speak of him by name as a victim of epi- lepsy for fear of hurting the susceptibilities of sur- vivors. Of epileptics long dead we may speak openly. And the three men of supreme intellect whom we have JULIUS C^SAR 21 selected as illustrious examples, and who in spite of epilepsy have achieved universal prominence in the great things of life, the things worth while, we need not hesitate to bring to notice by name, because there is no possibility, except in one instance, of compro- mising their descendants. We allude to Julius Caesar, Mohammed, and Lord Byron, — the founders, respect- ively, of an Empire, a Religion, and, a School of Poetry. CHAPTER II As a first illustration of an epileptic with every faculty apparently unimpaired, we will begin with Caesar. According to Plutarch, he " was of slender make, fair of feature, pale, emaciated, of a delicate constitution, subject to severe headache and violent attacks of epilepsy." He was born on the twelfth of July, about one hundred years before the birth of Christ. Even in his seventeenth year he was so con- spicuous a person that he broke his engagement with one woman, although she was of consular and opulent family, to marry another, Cornelia, daughter of the celebrated Cinna. In consequence of this alliance he was made Flamen Dialis, or priest of Jupiter, an of- fice which with this exception was only given to per- sons of mature years. It is singular in this connection that of the three per- sons we have selected in elucidation of our theory, the two monogamous men were notable for precocious love-affairs, while the polygamous one, — Mohammed, — did not fall in love until his twenty-ninth year, and then with a quiet, middle-aged widow, fifteen years his senior. Unlike the other two. Christian and pagan, respectively, he lived loyally with her for twenty-two years — until her death. So important as a prospective enemy was Caesar 22 JULIUS C^SAR 23 even then that the dictator Sulla at once proscribed him. Thus outlawed, a boy, yet a married man, he was taken ill, it would seem, with a series of epileptic convulsions, — status epilepticus, — and only escaped death while fleeing from the enemy by being con- cealed as an invalid in a litter. As an illustration of unconquerable courage and of being able at this early age to take care of himself is the fact that during this period of outlawry he w^as captured by Cilician pirates, — men who thought mur- der a trifle, — who held him for ransom. He re- mained with them a prisoner thirty-eight days, until his ransom came, and in this position of imminent danger — between Scylla and Charybdis — he showed heroic coolness and courage. His captors demanded twenty talents of ransom. He laughed at the small- ness of the amount and insisted on its being fifty, — about seventy-five thousand dollars. During the time of captivity, instead of his being in a state of intimidation, as might be supposed, he seems to have assumed command of the entire band of ship scuttlers and cutthroats. It was his practice then and all through his life to indulge in a short sleep after dinner, a custom which he characteristically de- clined to abandon, even when under the dangerous condition of duress. During this siesta he invariably insisted on silence, and otherwise treated his custodians as if they were his paid body-guards instead of his cap- tors. He joined on occasion in their diversions, and instead of spending the time of waiting in anxious sus- 24 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY pense and Idleness, he wrote poems and orations, re- hearsed them to his captors, and when they failed to show appreciation called them " dunces and numskulls untouched by sentiment or intelligence." Although his genius at this early period was only evolving, yet so attached was he to things intellectual even then, so devoted to the extension of the higher culture, that we believe he would even have started a Browning society among his obsequious yet amused assassins, if Browning had been sufficiently previous. Can we not imagine after the labor of the day his surprised and subdued jailors sitting around with their hands in their pockets, — if they had pockets in those days of the toga and seminakedness, — while their youthful prisoner declaimed orations to them to the accompaniment of brine-laden breezes, or breathed into their hairy ears love poems and sonnets by way of contrast? Is it possible for an extravagant imagina- tion to conceive anything more incongruous? He even threatened to crucify his captors, a favored di- version in those dear old days, if they did not pay him proper deference. They, the historian tells us, looked upon it all as a joke. This boy captive threatened his not too captivating captors with capital punishment until after his release, when collecting a fleet of ships at Miletus, he did return, and took them prisoners. He also took all their valuables, including the money paid for his own ransom, and actually did crucify at Pergamos all the prisoners he had taken, according to promise. He never failed to keep his word. JULIUS C^SAR 25 His insistence on their demanding a larger ransom was not so bad — for an epileptic. Prudence ever thus commands the forces of the future. Yet we are told that Caesar was not cruel, that this was but mere playfulness, like a kitten with a mouse, or a terrier with a rat, that he only had that disregard for human life which was of the period rather than of the man. In spite of this vindictiveness as a boy, he subsequently in his victories exercised great clemency for those times, when no quarter was shown the van- quished. So noted for clemency was he that he was called by way of distinction ** the lenient conqueror." In the cutting of the throats even of friends in those barbarous days there seems to have been no " compunc- tious visitings of conscience," not even regret; indeed conscience seems to be a modern invention, anyhow. After this boyish escapade Caesar went to Rhodes to study rhetoric, having as fellow-students Cicero and Mark Antony, and was so successful as a student that he afterward became known as the second orator of Rome, only because Cicero was the first. In spite of his infirmity and semi-invalidism, success in any career seemed possible to him, for he had excessive persistence and seems to have been among the earliest of those who lived actively and simultaneously the physical and the intellectual life, a commendable but rare combination. Upon his return from his studies he impeached Dolabella for misdemeanor in of^ce, and Publius Antonius for corruption, and was so convinc- ing as a pleader that the defendants were compelled 26 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY to appeal to the tribunes of the people. This he did merely by way of trying his forensic wings, and to show that his oratory, unlike the ordinary sort, was more than vocabulary. Plutarch tells us that the eloquence he exhibited in Rome in also defending persons implicated in crime gained for him a considerable interest. His sword was double-edged. His engaging address and con- servatism carried the heart of the people, *' for he had a condescension to his elders not to be expected in so young a man." What our Jeremiahs lament as the lost art of deferential respect for the white head seems by this time to have extended to the Imperial City, since this solitary instance of the opposite was excep- tional enough to be put upon record. We ourselves never could see that there was any- thing specially honorable in gray locks, rather there is dishonor in them unless their owner has done some- thing commendable during his evidently long life. The frosty pole does not always imply venerableness, often the opposite. We know the possessors of not a few such who ought rather to be tarred and feathered than revered, — wretches, decrepit in iniquity, their white heads but emphasizing protracted depravity, a flag of but pretentious truce floating over impotent and incapable tyranny. When gray hair means a life spent in the service of man it's different. But to return to Caesar. He jilted the first woman he was engaged to, although she was of powerful family, and he divorced the next one, Cornelia, — the JULIUS C^SAR ^^ divorce is not an American invention, — not because she was guilty but because she was accused of guilt. " Caesar's wife," he said, " must be above suspicion." He pronounced publicly, contrary to custom, heart- rending panegyrics over his next two wives, then re- tired with his varied wedlock experiences into well- earned freedom, where he remained, with the exception of a few lapses, during the remainder of his life. We have wondered why Balzac in his book, '^ The Petty Annoyances of Married Life," did not mention Caesar among his illustrations, with his varied nuptial experiences and personal knowledge of the subject of " how to be happy though married." If he had in- cluded him among his examples of gracious submission to petty domestic annoyances he would, we imagine, have shown the justice of adding at least another leaf to the laurel crown that covered the bald head of our hero. It would be of interest, too, to know with what degree of tolerance his various wives regarded his convulsions, and how the community regarded them, — what effect, for instance, Caesar's last fit in the pres- ence of his delegates was likely to have on the coming election. If at a public gathering in ancient Rome a man happened to have a convulsion, no matter how important the meeting, it was immediately dispersed. And how were his soldiers affected by their com- mander's having a seizure at the beginning of a cam- paign, at the end of a battle, or while making love, after the pagan custom of the period, to a brand-new sweetheart ? 28 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY In some of our States epilepsy is a cause for divorce. Caesar, the epileptic, to the contrary, bounced the non- epileptic. To be just and generous we must give Caesar credit for never having cut off the heads of his discredited waives as our burly " Defender of the Faith " did. He more humanely, perhaps, gave them legal authority to marry again, so that he gained their respect rather than incurred their displeasure. He contracted debts equal to a million and a half dollars before getting remunerative employment, and when elected edile^ not only paid for the contests of three hundred and twenty pairs of gladiators with other people's money, — a custom it would seem still in vogue, — but in all other diversions outdid precedent. To paraphrase from Sir Joshua, was ever epileptic so trusted ? He would seem to have rested but little either day or night. Continuing rapidly from one point of po- litical importance to another at last he united with Pompey and Cassius, forming the alliance known as the First Triumvirate, and obtained for himself by popular vote governmental control in Cisalpine Gaul, Trans- alpine Gaul, and Illyricum. Both by valor and eloquence he thus obtained the highest reputation in the field and in the Senate. " Beloved and esteemed by his fellow-citizens," writes Suetonius, " he enjoyed successively every magisterial and military honor the state could give, consistent with its constitution.'' JULIUS C^SAR 29 Thus this man, — who was an exquisite, a poHtician, a poet, an orator, a married man, and an epileptic at eighteen, and a universal conqueror and master in lit- [erature, oratory, and statesmanship at forty, — instead of being* a burden upon the state, or a menace to the prosperity of his family, enriched the state by invading and making tributary foreign powers without appar- ently making enemies of the vanquished, a feat in itself, extended its dominion, increased its influence, and at last, as Cassius said, " had grown so great that he be- strode the narrow world like a colossus," and scorned to have a rival in the management of the whole earth. Says Mark Antony, who had evidently seen him in convulsions : " When the fit was on I marked how he did shake; 'tis true this god did shake." Again, " Ye gods, it doth amaze me a man of such a feeble temper should so get the start of the majestic world and bear the palm alone." This, to be sure, is but Shakespeare ; but it is true to the facts as recorded by historians. We would hardly recommend horseback riding to an epileptic, " but by dint of perseverance," says the historian Oppius, '' Caesar became an expert horseman, often dictating to two or three secretaries at once while in the saddle, and rode without using his hands," which we are assured he could do with his horse at full speed. We would have thought this statement fabulous, the friendly exaggeration of an ardent admirer, but we have had a somewhat similar experience in our own practice. Mr. A. H., of Germantown, Pa., had con- 30 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY vulsions daily for many years, and during the time he was undergoing care at our hands insisted on taking up as an occupation the " breaking " of wild western horses, a practice that he followed, as Caesar did horseback riding, without accident. For the last four years this gentleman, unlike Caesar, has given up both epilepsy and horse-training. It was Caesar, too, — for his genius was inventive as well as military, — who first wrote personal letters to people living in the same city, in order to expedite business, thus avoiding the ordinary flippancies and other impedimenta of personal interview. The reader, we trust, will excuse these prolixities. They seem to us necessary in order to exhibit the ac- tivity even in minutiae of unimpaired faculty running parallel with a serious nervous diseasje, and also to show that heroism and a life of toil, hardship, and mul- tifarious accomplishments are not inconsistent with un- complicated epilepsy, or even with epilepsy complicated with other diseases as this was. It is necessary, too, to give details in order to be in a position to encourage epileptics, even when they cannot be altogether cured, to feel that it may be possible in spite of their handicap to outstrip in usefulness those who started with them in the race of life. We have in our possession the school certificate of a boy who four years ago was sent to us by a brother physician as a *' nervous wreck." His condition was due as much to enforced idleness, exemption from study, and artificially engendered fear as it was to con- JULIUS C^SAR 31 viilsions. Although he averaged eight convulsions a month, we recommended his being returned to school and being put merely on a controlled diet, v^ith treat- ment to counteract dietary and other errors. The re- sult was that the patient skipped a whole division in his studies and has had but one convulsion since he came to us, which was due to dietary disobedience. He was admitted last September into the Southern Manual Training School without examination, and although absent three wxeks because of other sickness, he re- ceived, as may be shown, the following certificate: " English, Latin, History, Algebra, German, Science, Constructive Drawing, Free-hand Drawing, Joining, Tinsmithing, Penmanship, Commercial Arithmetic, — satisfactory in every respect." This boy, six feet two inches tall, in his eighteenth year, who has now gone four years and six months without convulsions or other signs of epilepsy, has escaped forever being discouraged by sympathetic friends into perpetual ignorance and uselessness, which is the next thing to if not worse than death. It is because of the lack of proper management rather than of medication that the ordinary reflex convulsions of childhood and adolescence sometimes develop into epilepsy. Skillful hygienic and psychic surveillance of such children without much medicine would often prevent such patients from acquiring the epileptic habit, for it does sometimes appear as an ac- quired habit, especially in cases of high-strung hysteri- cal persons. Again it may be intercurrent; that is to 32 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY say, coming in the wake of some previously present disease or condition, the removal of which cures the epilepsy. But to return again to our waiting Caesar. He never but once made his infirmity an excuse for any- thing that happened or a reason for the avoidance of duty, as he might have done. Even when he came to unbridged rivers during his campaigns he swam across them, sometimes helped by inflated bladders, but usually unaided. Once, hav- ing a seizure in the water, he cried out, you remember, " Help me, Cassius, or I perish ! " He explored personally and afoot conquered cities, accompanied by way of precaution by but one or two servants, — an admirable precaution for epileptics, when at all possible. If the company of a servant or friend is not available, then epileptics should always carry a card in their wallet, giving name and address and announcing the particulars of their ailment. Be- cause of not having taken this precaution many an in- nocent person, in spite of incoherent remonstrance, has been marched off to a police station and locked up with criminals. This is more likely to occur after the con- vulsion, when the patient, having regained the upright position, attempts to walk. The unsteady gait, vacant gaze, disordered and soiled clothing, are so suggestive of helpless intoxication that you can hardly expect the officer, even with best intentions, to distinguish be- tween inebriety and the immediate sequelae of an at- tack of epileptic convulsions. JULIUS C^SAR 33 As an illustration of his rapidity of movement, at the battle of Thrapsus when Scipio was constructing ramparts Caesar made his way into an almost impene- trably wooded country and utterly routed him, putting the whole army of this experienced veteran to flight. And as if that were not enough for one day, he took the entire camp of Afranius, destroyed that of the Numidians, their King Jubba barely escaping with his life, and thus in twenty-four hours made himself the master of three camps, with their enormous booty in silver and gold, killed fifty thousand of the enemy, with a loss to himself of only fifty men. After this battle, w^hile drawing up his army and giving orders, he had an attack, Plutarch tells us, of *' his old distemper" — and do you wonder? Before it had time to overpower him, he directed his men, Plutarch continues, to carry him to a neighboring tower until the fit was over. He seems usually to have had premonitions of his seizures, and must also have connected them with either gastric or intestinal disturbance, as indicated also in the case of Lord Byron, hence his excessive abstemiousness, except on rare occasions. Yet, in spite of all, during his life he won and put upon record three hundred and twenty triumphs, to say nothing of his orations, his history, and the number of destroyed cities he rebuilt. CHAPTER III " C^SAR," says M. Ophelott, — see his Melanges PhilosophiqueSj — " had one predominant passion. It was love of glory; and he passed forty years of his life in seeking opportunities to foster and encourage it. His soul, entirely absorbed in ambition, did not open itself to other impulses." This opinion, notwithstanding the fact of Caesar's having extravagantly declared that he " would rather be first in a village than second in Rome," has been rejected by subsequent writers. " We must not imagine," says the same writer, *' that Caesar w^as born a warrior as Sophocles and Milton were born poets, for if nature had made him a citizen of Syria, he would have been the most voluptuous of men." '^ If in our day he had been born in Penn- sylvania, he w^ould have been the most inoffensive of Quakers and would not have disturbed the tranquillity of the New World." He continues, " Nature formed in the same mould Caesar, Mahomet, Cromwell, and Kublai-Khan! Had Caesar been placed in Persia, he would have made the conquest of India; in Arabia, he would have been the founder of a new religion; in London, he would have stabbed his sovereign or pro- cured his assassination under the sanction of law." Such conjectures are gratuitous, and might be con- tinued about any prominent man endlessly, but, as 34 JULIUS C^SAR 35 the old lady, old in wretchedness, said about sympathy : " It cost nothing and is good for nothing." We will say nothing about Caesar's conquests in Britain and Gaul and of his Commentaries telling about them for fear of harrowing up old sorrows and renew- ing again the wretchedness of our otherwise happy youth, for we cannot all agree with what George Bar- row, in " Lavengro," said of Old Parr, " He flogged Greek and Latin into me until I loved him." You remember how Caesar constructed the supposed impossibility of a bridge across the rapidly running Rhine in ten days, and created a buttressed barrier above it to break its destructive current ; how with rude, untutored soldiers he did it, and how it took us longer to read intelligently his concise account of the engineer- ing feat than it did him to make a way for his army across the otherwise impassable river. It was Heine, while a student, who said : " I know^ now why the ancient Romans accomplished so much — some of them, too, before they had attained manhood. It was because they did not have to stop on the way to study Latin." Both by accomplishment and affability, notwith- standing M. Ophelott's strictures, our hero won all hearts. His consideration for people was familiar, almost fatherly. He was said to have known per- sonally every soldier in his army and to have been able to call each of them by name. He was interested in their recreations as well as in their capacity for effective work, and at least on one occasion participated 36 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY personally in their sports. People were attracted to him as the seed of the bulrush is attracted to water. Even his quondam enemy Cleopatra, after he had conquered Greece and reduced Egypt, learning that he desired to see her, instead of waiting for him to make at least the first call, as a modest young lady should, got into a boat in the dusk of the evening — without even a chaperone, think of it! — and made for his quarters, taking with her but one attendant. Realiz- ing soon the difficulty of entering the palace unde- tected, she had her companion, Appolodore, roll her up in a carpet, like a bale of rugs, and carry her on his back through the gates to Caesar. It was because of this comic opera stratagem and the charm and beauty of her conversation — they both spoke Greek — and not because of any ordinary affair of state, as the merely materialistic historian believes who thinks there is no truth but facts, that caused Caesar afterward to insist on her ruling with him. The subsequent birth of their daughter Caesario showed how invincible he was both in love and in war. Can you not imagine, then, with the effect of this brilliant epileptic's achievements extending over the civilized world, how different it might have been with us, even in far away America, if when a boy his mother had put him as unfit for life into a sanitarium for epi- leptics, or if the family physician had drenched and stupefied him daily with saturated solutions of bro- mide of potassium? It would have changed the face of history and made many of the great events of the modern world impossible. CHAPTER IV In exhibiting the mental inventory of a man, in order to know him really, it is necessary, as we have intimated before, to include among the greater things the minutiae,- — little personal peculiarities, eccentrici- ties, pastimes, how he acts while pursuing the even tenor of his way as well as during the torrents, the tempests, and we might say the whirlwinds of his life, the addictions of his spare moments, what he does when at leisure, and the like. A man's profession or occupation may be an acci- dent, or selected without his volition, because of family interest or preference. He may have been coerced into a vocation by peculiar circumstances ; but his pastimes, the predilections of his leisure, the em- ployments of a man's spare moments, may tell more about him than the more conspicuous activities of his public career. We labor often at uncongenial tasks that we may afterward pursue our heart's desire, to obtain leisure and means for private pursuits being often but the ultimatum of public effort. Who does not know Luther better in his " Table Talk " than in his *' Sermons " and the belligerencies of his turbulent life? Selden's " Discourses " present a truer picture of the man, — his wit, learning, credu- lity, logical reasoning, and scholarly versatility, — than 38 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY could any record of his public works. The '' Golden Book " of Marcus Aurelius reveals his spiritual preferences and character better than the most stately history could without them. Ben Jonson's " Tim- ber '" is perhaps more self-revealing, especially in his attitude toward his contemporaries, than his serious life-work. More's " Utopia," the work of his leisure, makes known more of the inner man, his real con- victions and aspirations, than any public life could. And Malory's ''La Morte D'Arthur," while talking seriously of legends, teaches more than Malory, folk- lore, the manners and customs of his time, and it also teaches more history than would many stately tomes devoted to that noble science. Grote and Rogers were bankers that they might be, respectively, historian and poet; Hugh Miller worked at stone-cutting that he might become a geologist; Spinoza was a polisher of lenses in order to dedicate his leisure to philosophy; Hunter practiced medicine to gain the guinea that enabled him to devote his day to research ; Elihu Burrit worked as a blacksmith that he might in his privacy study languages. It is by his *' Hesperides " and " Noble Numbers," and not by his sermons, that we know the clergyman Herrick; Sir John Lubbock is discovered in " The Pleasures of Life," the work of learned leisure, rather than by his commercial successes, his legitimate life-work, and Goethe reveals himself more in " Gesprache mit. Goethe " of Eckermann rather than in -his proclaimed productions for the people. JULIUS C^SAR 39 We remember coming across an expression some- where, perhaps in Plutarch, about Cicero, — that in walking he clasped his fingers behind his back, and that they were always nervously twitching, as if em- phasizing we then supposed the telling parts of some prospective oration against Mark Antony, — and these orations, by the way, were the cause of his death. And this simple fact, or some personal revelation in some of his writings, has added to our knowledge of the man who at the age of sixteen assumed " the manly gown," and who was made rich by the un- paralleled gifts of clients and admirers, most of whom did not wait until their death to show their apprecia- tion. Yet he regarded life as the mere moving of a weaver's shuttle, not aware of the design upon which it was working, and he confessed even in the zenith of his fame that he did not know which was best, life or death. It is thus the casual and unpremeditated, the mere whims and eccentricities, the private acts and words spoken in house-coat and slippers, and not always the moment when men are bending themselves with valor against the obstinate tasks of life, that tell of the real man. '' The little folly," Shakespeare says, " that wise men do make a great show." In justification, then, of our interest in trifling per- sonal peculiarities as indication of the pan-sanities of life we may say with Terence, Homo sum: humani a me nihil alicniim piito. Apologizing for keeping the subject of our review 40 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY waiting in our anteroom, as Chesterfield kept Dr. John- son, while attending to less worthy visitors, as a patient of distinction, we will take his temperature, percuss and oscult him once more, or like a lovingly edited book, pick him up again for more careful re- vision. Although by no means a valetudinarian, yet in every way Caesar was careful of his health and the cosmetic management of his body, even to the point of squeam- ishness, else his infirmity might have cut short his career or diminished its brilliancy. He needed to be careful. If he had lived in the gluttonous days of Caligula or Nero, and had to any extent indulged in their dietary excesses, he never would have crossed the Rubicon nor effected the important victory over Pompey the Great at Pharsalia, and the protests of his nervous system in the way of convulsions would have been more numerous. He rather confined his indulgencies to certain periods, with long stretches of intervening abstemi- ousness, — see Anthony Trollope's " Caesar," — and looked after his body with the strictest exactitude. After the custom of the period among persons of his class he perfumed himself sometimes twice daily, with a not too scrupulous aid of his attendant, and was as careful of his complexion and the flexibility of his muscles as an acrobat or ballet-dancer. Just the mere act of living, notwithstanding the delicacy of his con- stitution, was luxury to him, and the exuberance of the bath and its details, pagan that he was, was a de- CxUUS JULIUS CESAR This contemporary portrait of Cssar, for which in all prob- ability he sat, is very interesting because it unmistakably ex- hibits the Fades Efilcfticus. The original is in the ^[useum of Naples. Facing p. 40. JULIUS C^SAR 41 light. Unlike certain medieval religionists, who re- garded bathing wicked and immodest, and conse- quently never resorted to it, the bath was one of his few luxuries. He paid the strictest attention to his hair, although he had so little of it. In spite of portraits and busts to the contrary — few of those known to us being by contemporaries — it only grew in a narrow fringe low down on the back of his head, like reversed Gladstone or John Tyndall whiskers, instead of under the chin under the occiput. Yet, like the rest of the bald- headed the world over, he allowed this occipital fringe to grow long, and boldly combed it forward, like a vine over a blank wall, in the vain hope of concealing his cranial nakedness, — the touch of nature that makes the whole bald world kin. Addison poetically said that Caesar being bald covered his head with laurels, and he was even vain enough. Gibbon writes, to wear this laurel covering in public. The care he exercised toward the protection of the hair of his head he extended to the destruction of the superfluous hair of his body, which he had painfully removed, like a Chinese mandarin or a North Ameri- can Indian, with tweezers. This afforded his attend- ants of the bath the opportunity of rubbing his hair- denuded cuticle until it shone, a contemporary said, " like alabaster or polished marble." Suetonius writes of " the shiny whiteness of his ivory-tinted epidermis," which was evidently the anemia of his disease, and the *' cheerfulness and 42 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY seemliness of his well-groomed features." This phrase, " well-groomed," applied to the masculine toilet, as you see, is at least nineteen hundred years old. *' He was more economic of time," we are told, "than of money," and recognized, too, at this primi- tive hygienic age, the importance of proper food and rest. He always, as you may remember, took a nap after dinner, which may have accounted for his almost uni- form affability under the most trying circumstances, for he could order the head to be removed from the shoulders of an old friend as graciously as if con- ferring a favor. He had so many projects on hand at the same time as not to be very much overwhelmed by the miscarriage of any one of them, a thing that very seldom happened. And although he was so ener- getic and of such constant activity, unlike most busy men he was nearly all the time leisurely suave and considerate to the point of effeminacy. With the pavidity of a supersensitive woman — the part of his make-up emphasized by Donatello in his profile portrait — he had the fearless courage of a lion. He was without a thought of loss, for he never failed to believe in himself. He feared no one, not even his own invincible legions, whom he would turn upon on the slightest provocation, quelling rebellion by a phrase, and reducing the most belligerent to obedience and humiliation by a word. In the Commentaries, as the reader knows, he al- JULIUS C^SAR 43 ways speaks of himself in the third person, Caesar, and does so just as he would speak of anyone else, not boastingly, but simply telling of his own exploits as he would those of others. And he does it, too, in such a clear and concise way that you feel that he is but stating the truth and that he has seen and ex- perienced all he expresses. The Romans were cruel beyond the credibility of the people of to-day, who regard life sacred and mur- der the greatest crime. In this particular Caesar was also guilty to a frightful extent; yet he won, as we have seen, the reputation of having a nature of un- usual clemency. He never, though, committed mur- der, as you might say Nero did, for the love of it. He slaughtered none but for policy; yet this heroic man, with the fantastic delicacy of a euphemistic fe- male, put to death hundreds, whole cities, including women and children, without a pang, when he felt it necessary to the success of his undertakings. This was not because of his being an epileptic. It was the policy and practice of the period, and he did not al- ways rise above it. We say the ancients were cruel, and pagans pitiless, but were they more so than the people of the Middle Ages, when the world was unitedly Christian, before " heresy " split it into parts ? It was in the " Ages of Faith," not before Chris- tianity, that '' the most Christian King of the Franks," Charlemagne, after one battle alone put to relentless death four thousand five hundred 44 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY cowed captives ''for the love of God/' At the com- mand of a despot as implacable as himself he invaded without cause vast territories, compelling the inhabi- tants to submit either to death or baptism, unmercifully pillaged cities and set fire to unarmed villages, sparing neither age, sex, nor condition. Yet, it would seem, because he could write Latin and speak Greek and even '' attempted to compose a grammar," and besides " opened a school in his own palace for the education of the children of his serv^ants " — many of them were his own, for continence was not one of his virtues — subsequent writers, repeating one another like sheep in an only trail, have called him " good and great." Now when our amiable millionaires, who neither commit murder nor arson, but to the contrary endow colleges and erect libraries, hospitals for the forlorn, and homes for the indigent, the people that praise Charlemagne call them murderers and robbers. Thus " wisdom and goodness to the vile seem vile " and scribbling gentility stultifies itself before a frown- ing Providence. No man ever accomplished more in his own person than Caesar, and no man ever did so many things so well, outside of what might be called his own pro- fession, — arms. He not only created and personally enlisted his army, but literally led it. Legion and legion he col- lected individually by the force of his own character, and he personally managed the distribution of the enormous quantities of plunder, with which he allured JULIUS C^SAR 45 his soldiers to abnormal valor. He held himself also personally responsible for every detail of camp life, and at the same time managed the perplexing politics of Rome, where he had many enemies, among them Pompey the Great, his son-in-law, the man who, some one has said, got up the first " corner " in wheat, which was enough without anything else to distinguish him. From the beginning of the Gallic war until his as- sassination he was fighting for his life, every year but one. Yet his works, including his history, went on; and the literary style of it was so fine, indicating per- sistent polishing, that it elicited praise from all the great critics of Rome, at a time, too, when concerning literature Rome, like lago, was nothing if not critical. In those days when literature was held in such high esteem, Cicero wrote, Vcrcor uf hoCj quod dicaui, per- inde intellegi possit audituni atqiie ipse cogitans sen- tio. Sixteen hundred years afterward, Montaigne, who, as everybody knows, was a good judge of Latin and a great admirer of Csesar, said, " I read this au- thor with somewhat more reverence and respect than is usually allowed human writings, at one time con- sidering him in his person by his actions and mi- raculous greatness, and at another in the purity and inimitable polish of his language and style, wherein he not only excels all other historians, as Cicero con- fesses, but peradventure even Cicero himself." See Florio's " Montaigne," where he speaks with such gar- rulous enthusiasm about the great Julius. Shakespeare, who seems more than any man to have 46 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY been dowered with omniscience, makes Cymbeline say, " We may have many Caesars, but never another JuHus." In contemplating the greatness and versatiHty of this man-elous man we have imagined, as hero-worshiper and physician ahke, w'hat an honor it w^ould have been to have had him as a patient. He was as deferential to his medical attendant as a mediaeval king to his confidential poisoner, when everything went well; but in case of the opposite he was as likely to call to his aid his private and particular assassin to rid him of an enemy who was " not fit to doctor a cat." For the white man is uncertain. On one occasion he had a servant he was attached to instantly put to death because of his having been guilty of a not unusual breach of domestic ethics. Yet the position of physician might have been dif- ferent and worth the risk. Think of its glorious func- tions ! — advising one of the greatest men the w^orld has ever known, and that man a semi-invalid, " sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought," against the folly of polypharmacy; keeping off knavish Augurs, animal therapy advocates, and nostrum venders, and a hun- dred best cures for epilepsy, '* made in Germany," — protecting him against the allurements of specious quackery in any form ; traveling with him through con- quered cities, getting acquainted with unknown cli- mates, manners, customs, meeting barbarous races of men ; aiding Sallust, or whoever he was, in proof-read- ing the Commentaries, which must have required many JULIUS C^SAR 47 revisions to have attained their present precise perfec- tion, facihtating their easier interpretation for future schoolboys, thus adding to the fehcity of unborn na- tions, besides participating in all the wild exhilarating life of the open camp. Perhaps, too, his physician would have had the pleasure of spending quiet evenings with him in the companionship of the few intimates he affected, — orators, artists, literary men, philosophers. For, as well as fields of carnage and slaughter, he must have had gardens of the Hesperides too, where he met his friends, and talked confidences, and expressed and exhibited affection. Since there is time, there must be in every career social amenities and laughter as well as tears, asphodel meadows as well as Gethsemanes. CHAPTER V The attention given by Caesar to personal adorn- ment may be considered unworthy of so great a man. During the time of the ** Dedine " such effeminacies as we have enumerated were subjects of reprobation by censors and poets ahke. Yet it was the custom in those days, especially among persons of the higher Roman classes who were still greatly influenced by Greek culture, physical and otherwise, and Persian too, perhaps, to regard the body and its beauty as some- thing divine and demanding sedulous care and atten- tion. Cicero and many prominent Romans were by educa- tion more Greek than Roman. The gods with them were always beautiful, if not always exercising beauti- ful restraint. Yet divinity did not have the same meaning then as now ; it was altogether anthropomor- phic. Their deities, too, were often grossly human, but seldom ugly : Silenus, Bacchus, Sators, and Fauns, symbolizing even their grossest activities, presented characteristic comeliness. The popular question then was, " Is it beautiful?" Physical beauty justified all things, even immorality. Now we ask, '' Is it right? " Then the aesthetic occupied the prominent place in public and private affairs; now the ethical. Then it 48 JULIUS C^SAR 49 was the man who had left the world without having seen the Jupiter Olympus of Phidias who was thought to have been deprived of his inheritance, for even the sight of a beautiful object was an asset of value; now it is the man who has not been a good Samaritan, who fails to exercise the altruistic prerogative, who suffers loss. Thus are illustrated different viewpoints, — the one an inheritance from the Greeks, the other from the Jews. For morality as we understand it, as we have been taught by the chosen people, was then a terra in- cognita; the moral faculty atrophied for lack of use, so that such a thing as a passion for humanity or righteousness was unknown, or almost unknown. Mark Antony ordered his favorite murderer, — about to start in pursuit of his schoolfellow and former friend,- — when he found him '* to cut off his head and hands and bring them to him." That schoolfellow and former friend was the fugitive orator and author, Cicero, — ^that same Cicero that defended the cause of Sicily against Verres, and that was but a few days be- fore the darrling of the people. The order was carried out, and the head and hands of Cicero were brought to Rome and treated by Antony and his wife with bar- barous indignity, without eliciting special horror or disapprobation. Now if a man cruelly prolongs the death of a rat he is put in prison or fined, unless he be a king of Belgium, when he may cut off human hands with im- punity. The best people in those days — see Taine's 50 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY '' L'Art " — devoted much of their time to the develop- ment of personal comeliness, as a religious duty. The cultivation of the beautiful was a popular science; the different parts of the ideal body v^ere reduced to defi- nite measurements, a standard of grace was imagined, the attainment of which, like the points of a " ten thou- sand dollar hen " or a " bust in butter " with us, was the subject of popular applause. Did you ever see Ruskin's '' self-made man and the Apollo Belvedere " ? Just as the religious with us dedicate their days to charity and good works so they dedicated theirs to the development of grace and symmetry. So Caesar in the care of his attenuated body but followed the mode. Indeed, it would seem from the atmosphere of man- created beauty that surrounded them that the things that we as a nation are but beginning to know they absorbed from their infancy. A desire for every sort of beauty was almost an instinct with them. Love of the beautiful in art is not essential to Christianity, which has to do rather with righteousness, but is an in- heritance from older peoples, including the Greeks, the Romans, and the Saracens. Everything must be beau- tiful, from a broom-handle to a coronet; from the prow of a ship to the buckle of a sandal ; from the head of a hand-made nail, with which they fastened together two pieces of wood, marble, or bronze, to the frieze of a temple; from the earthen receptacle for the oil with which they anointed their bodies daily to the incinerary urns that held the ashes of the departed. Baths were not so much for cleanliness as luxury, JULIUS C^SAR 51 and physical exercise was not practiced so much for health as comeliness, not so much for strength as trans- lucency of integument and pulchritude. A physical blemish was worse than a notorious vice. Hence where they had perfection of art and aesthetic magnificence, such as temples of the winds, and par- thenons, and pantheons, and buildings of unparalleled and transcendent splendor to every known and un- known god, we have orphan asylums, and hospitals, and homes for the aged, and reformatories, and li- braries, and free schools, and country weeks, and epi- leptic colonies, and insane asylums, and every variety of altruistic activity, even to the point of embarrassing abundance. Defectives that they put to death we house in palaces and wait on like willing slaves, and feebleness with us makes a stronger appeal than strength and forcefulness. Christianity has made the difference. Caesar was also particular about not only the sanitary but the artistic care of his hands and feet, and treated them as important members of the physical common- wealth, worthy of all honor. And he was as squeam- ish about his food as a chlorotic girl. Like all the exquisites of his moment, he was fastidious not only about his garments but about the draping of them. The folds, we are told, had to fall gracefully, no mat- ter how much practice it took to make them do so, and in private and public life he managed his raiment with the skill of a tragedian or prima donna. Donatello, as we have intimated, in his interesting 52 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY terra cotta profile conception of Caesar, would seem to have taken note of this trait of his character, for he makes him the high-born dilettante and exquisite, with the delicate susceptibility of a too secluded lady- patrician, or of a vestal virgin, rather than the master spirit of an imperial senate or the virile general of a world-conquering army. Even in death, you remember, he exhibited this deli- cate sartorial characteristic, when covering his face with the end of his toga, so as to conceal, even in dis- solution, any change of feature that might be unseemly, as a lady with her fan. The ruling passion was strong even in death, and thus having let the curtain fall as it were on his greatness, he died, the garments of his angel of death bespattered with his blood. In spite of the doubtful Et tu, Briite^ and its conjec- tural interpretation, it may be that in the rapidity and confusion of his assassination — for it came like a sudden summons to a higher court — that he thought this, which was his death, but another seizure of ep- ilepsy, for the epileptic die often, hence his covering his face with his flowing robes, as was his custom in an attack so as to conceal compromising contortions. We are aware that the Roman noble when about to die either turned his face to the wall or covered it with the skirt of his toga. Nevertheless we feel that our theory about Caesar's disposal of his garment was due rather to his conviction that he was about to have another convulsion. He did not, like King George, of England, exactly JULIUS C^SAR 53 make his own clothes; yet, usually under his personal direction, they were made by his wife, and he gave to them as much attention as if he were planning a cam- paign, or as if he were a Beau Brummel or a Nash, and needed to increase his fascinations by the fashion of his raiment. Not only the color and the quality of the fabric but the trimmings also received careful at- tention. It is strange that the omniscient Carlyle did not mention in '' Sartor Resartus " Ccosar's sartorial elegance and fondness for the things of the man- milliner. He was thus particular about his appearance until toward the end of his career. As he approached what was to him " the sear and yellow leaf," although he was only fifty-six years old when he died, he was not so careful. At that period in the life of a man when he needs to be more particular about his personal appear- ance, Caesar then, like Nero always, became negligent, even to the point of forgetting at times to shave, and did not to such an extent as formerly patronize the bath. His eyes, we are told, were brown, and not to be out of harmony — like George Washington and Adam and the present royal family of England — his hair was red, we would say auburn. His gait was dignified, expression serious, and in company, rather from good-nature than training, he was scrupulously attentive to all the amenities of polite life. At his best he was a Chesterfield of deportment. Kindly consid- eration, when it did not conflict with what he thought 54 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY duty, was an endearing characteristic. He was se- verely just and tenderly sympathetic. Yet, as we have seen, he was as regardless of human life when he imag- ined the occasion demanded it as if it were unworthy of serious thought. He put persons to death, even his friends and the members of his own domestic circle, without scruple or qualm of conscience, just as if re- questing them to retire into another room, and with about the same satisfaction, we imagine, felt by a cat when licking her lips after having eaten your pet canary. People then had no regard for human life, not even their own; but, oh, what they accomplished before quitting it, — the matchless unattainable things we have inherited from them, — what they achieved and created ! What times those were, after all ! Yet, no time seems great when here, and perhaps future in- heritors of twentieth century conquests will wax elo- quent about us also. What greater thing has ever happened in the world than the multitude of handsome and splendidly equipped libraries erected all over the world by our Carnegies, or the art collections gathered by our Pierpont Morgans? Nothing in Csesars life showed that he was con- cerned in the slightest about a future state, nor did he seem to have any theory about it. In collecting from rather voluminous reading into one ensemble these domestic and personal traits, which were dwelt upon, too, with so much particularity by the persons who have written so lovingly about Csesar, notwithstanding the barbarity of some of them and JULIUS C^SAR 55 the trifling nature of others, they impress you with the fact that his all-seeing mind took in the infinitesimally great and little, and that there was nothing in his life especially indicative of epilepsy. They convince you, too, that his disease may be present in man without interfering with the exercise of the highest faculties. In addition to his wives, whom Plutarch tells us he changed four times, according to the prevalent pagan practice, — a practice that certain misfit clergy- men are endeavoring to revise and make respectable, contrary to the teachings of their Master, — there were certain '' Bies," as Montaigne calls them, whom, as Charles Lamb said about one of the English kings, ** he loved besides his wife." Montaigne, in his gar- rulous way and with characteristic unction, gives a list of these morganatic maids, or matrons, as the case may be, and it includes other queens besides Cleopatra. We learn also from Alontaigne that the children of such unions were called " Merlins." The reader will be reminded of the peculiar Merlin in " La Morte d'Arthur," who was no better than Edmund in " King Lear," and that Caesar was said to be the father of a number of such persons. He, however, left no legitimate heir. It would be instructive to trace his progeny in the interest of hereditary epilepsy ; but it is not possible. His marriage with Calphurnia was childless. His daughter Julia, whose mother was Cornelia, died forty- four years before the Christian era. Caesarion, borne to him by Cleopatra, and the child Octavia were never 56 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY recognized as legitimate heirs, and died, or were put to death, without issue. So that there were no direct heirs at his death to inherit either his infirmity or his greatness. In his last will and testament he leaves the grandson of his youngest sister his successor. This is the *' Augustus Caesar " of history, "' the young Augustus," whose serious and handsome features have been made familiar by an antique bust, and during whose reign the temple of double-faced Janus, always open while war was being conducted in any of Rome's possessions, was -closed for the first time in ages. This was the period preceding the advent of nefarious Nero and marking the com.ing of Christ. CHAPTER VI The great were highly esteemed in the old days, but often only after their death. It's safer so, for you never can tell what a scoundrel a man may become in his subsequent life, even after the imposition of the laurel. But Caesar, although assassinated and by the chief men of Rome, was held, nevertheless, in exalted estimate while living ; and after his decease he had the royal honor paid him not only of having his profile stamped upon the coin of the realm, but numerous mon- uments were erected to him in various parts of the Em- pire. Memorials were also raised in his honor by the government in every state of the Roman union and in every temple in Rome, and it was proclaimed that divine honor should be paid him everywhere. This was the origin perhaps of canonization with one branch of the Christian Church, inasmuch as it made him the object of w^orship and supplication, as if he were a god. After him, too, and in his honor Roman and other rulers were called Caesars. Another trait marking his versatility, but not, so far as I can remember, before mentioned as a distinguish- ing trait by his admirers, was his capacity as a con- structor of temples and palaces and rebuilder of ruined cities : that is to say, his interest in and addiction to the art that includes all art, — ■ architecture. The great 57 58 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY eras and epochs of the world, except the Reformation, were ushered in or were crowned by the construction of mammoth buildings, temples, mausoleums, churches, mosques, pyramids; for they wTote in those remote days their epics, tragedies, and grotesqueries too in stone. Prehistoric America, Egypt, India, Syria, Greece, Rome, the Saracens, Italy, the period of the Gothic, the Renaissance, thus recorded the steps in the develop- ment of their greatness, and wrote their histories in stately buildings, mostly places of worship, — for man is naturally devout, — that are still, even in decay, ob- jects of special wonder. With us the man that builds an enduring home, a chateau, a school, a library, an academy, or college, is a marked man ; his name is em- balmed in local memory and likely to be transmitted, like coin in a cornerstone, to unborn generations. There have been men immortalized by the erection of a single building, — Sir Christopher Wren, St. Paul's; John I'Ahmer, the Alhambra; Pisistratus, the Temple of Jupiter; Herodius Atticus, the Stadium. Illustrations might be repeated endlessly. Some have attained fame by the decoration of a building, as Phidias by the sculptures of the Parthenon ; others, by the pictorial embellishments of the interior walls, as Tintoretto, by the frescoes of the Venetian Arsenal ; some, by the erection of parts of buildings; others, by the mere fractions of parts, as the Prentice Pillar at Hawthorneden. If Michael Angelo had done nothing else, the mere fact of his having reproduced the missing JULIUS C^SAR 59 hand of the Apollo Belvedere would have secured him remembrance. Men have gained glory by the building of a single church, or part of a church, or the rebuilding of one, as Yorkminster, its reconstruction transmitting to pos- terity the memory of three men, — Archbishop Rogers, Walter de Gray, and John M. Romaine. La France was immortalized by Canterbury, Bishop Padsey by the Galilee chapel of Durham, and the like; but Caesar not only raised great temples in their entirety but at- tended to their pictorial and sculptural decorations as well. Even the mutilated remains of one of these temples would give distinction to a city to-day, for they were wonders in marble, which under the touch of his imperial wand emerged from the heart of the earth like Venus from the sea, and that outran in splendor of ivory, bronze, and semi-precious stone such buildings as the " golden house "of Nero, which they preceded by a hundred years. Not only this, but he reconstructed whole cities, — their dwellings, palaces, places of worship, coliseums, theaters, pleasure gardens, and driveways, — in more than pristine magnificence. Cities that had been pre- * viously reduced by his own or other armies to ruins he re-erected with a splendor unknown to their founders. The cathedrals of the ages of faith, " poetry in stone," " frozen music," adding their deathless diapason to the slowly evolving harmony of the world, filling the soul with wonder, reverence, and awe, and raising it to heaven, required usually for their construction 6o IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY centuries of time and the combination of many minds to bring them to their state of devotion-inspiring sub- limity. But Caesar in his own person was responsible for many " temple-miracles," often in marble as white as snow and polished with the perfection of a gem for a lady's finger, for gods and goddesses were never more superbly honored in any land than by the archi- tecture and sculpture of the pagan world. Judging from the description of his collection of con- temporary and ancient art, which he personally gath- ered and housed in his palace on the Palatine Hill, as intimated by Pliny the Elder, Caesar was a collector as eager and far-reaching as Cicero or Richard Wal- lace, and he must have found the creation and re- creation of architectural grace and splendor a labor of love beyond that of the mere superintendent. These in his own lifetime did he who did so many things besides. For he was ruler as well as author, general as well as orator, poet as well as politician ; and guided the ship of state to salubrious havens as well as the ark of Roman imperialism to exalted ideals. So great were the things he inspired and personally commanded and managed that we would appoint a commission and charter a special steamer to bring it to America if we could only possess even one of the decorative figures, or the mere head of one of them — of the statue of Cleopatra, for example, that he had installed in the Temple of Venus Genetrix, — or an entablature, or a fluted column with capitals of gold from some one of his many buildings which are now in JULIUS C^SAR 6i dust, yet which once exhibited a splendor beyond that of Babylon or Heliopolis, and which were created as rapidly in marble, porphyry, ivory, and bronze as we imitate them in wood, plaster, and staff. If such a work of art were to be brought here, it would be photographed and journalized and copied in plaster and putty and celluloid, and given as a premium for a subscription to dollar magazines. It would be talked about in every village and vie with prizefighting re- ports in the Sunday papers, and enterprising railroads would arrange pilgrimages at reduced rates to gaze upon it. Thus commerce surrounds the objects of adoration with a nickel halo and humanity pays perpetual hom- age to greatness. MOHAMMED TO THE MEMORY OF FRANCES POWER COBBE Pioneer in the study of com- parative religions, this sketch of the Prophet of Arabia is reverently dedicated MOHAMMED , ft€ Um i^ CHAPTER VII efy'^i From Caesar, the founder of an empire, to Moham- med, the founder of a religion, there is a gulf of about six hundred years. The only resemblance that there is between these two is that they were both epileptics and both conquerors. Both wrote one epoch-making book, and both had irritable, nervous systems, which at varying intervals responded by convulsions to unknown stimuli. Caesar, as we have seen, only on one occasion at- tempted to make his malady an excuse for his conduct. But it has been said of Mohammed that he used his infirmity as a ladder up which, as the sun to its zenith, he climbed to the apex of his ambition, or mission, surely the most exalted ever achieved by mere man, — interpreter of the Most High to now nearly one hun- dred and seventy-seven million persons, who would still rather die than surrender allegiance to their Prophet; and who after thirteen centuries of experi- mental test still consider impious language uttered against him the same as if uttered against God, — ' blasphemy punishable by death. It has been said that there is hardly any other religion, Judaism excepted, that has been held so long by so many nationalities and 67 68 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY races of people without producing envy-engendering and perplexing schism. The author's purpose in the composition of this appreciation is not a panegyric on Mohammed, but rather an attempt to exhibit a mind unspoiled, yet epi- leptic : in other words, to demonstrate that such a dis- ease may exist side by side with attractive domestic qualities and great public achievements, that a brilliant career, although handicapped thus, is not necessarily precluded by epilepsy. Just as the Rabbis in their righteous zeal for ortho- doxy put the worst construction on all that Christ said and did, so the Christians of the time of Moham- med and subsequently, and not always with the high purpose of the Hebrew, but rather to justify their own rapacity and iniquitous treatment of Islam, put the worst construction on everything connected with the " False Prophet.'' Traces of this gratuitously created vilification, in spite of all that has been written to the contrary, are still to be found, if not in books, at least in general conversation. The old slanders are still repeated with irritating complacency, for there are not many things that live so long as does a cunningly devised calumny, when it appeals to cupidity and vanity. Mohammed was born at the end of the sixth cen- tury at Mecca. He was the son of a poor merchant, Abdallah by name, of whom it has been said — and this was considered of sufficient importance by Washing- ton Irving for him to quote it — that he was so beauti- MOHAMMED . 69 ful that " when he married Amina, subsequently Mo- hammed's mother, two hundred virgins broke their hearts from disappointed love." The father died soon after, some say before, his son's birth, and Moham- med's mother, according to the custom of her people, gave him for a time into the care of a Bedouin nurse, that he might be reared in the salubrious air of the desert. In consequence of repeated convulsions, he was returned in his third year, and from, then until his death, fifty-seven years afterward, he was the victim of all the phenomena of epilepsy. The epileptic cry, hallucinations of sight and hearing, automatism, tonic and clonic spasms, and all the prodromi and sequelae of convulsions would seem to have been distinctly mani- fest in his various seizures. It has been said of him that he was guilty of the "^ pious fraud " of assuring his followers that his spasms were merely periods when his soul separated from his body, was in communion with the Almighty, through the medium of the Archangel Gabriel, and that it was during these indirect seances with the Deity that he received instruction qualifying him to write the Koran. How true this is I do not know. I have found no such claim among Moslem writers. The monkish story also about his having trained a pigeon to light on his shoulder and pick corn from his ear, with the purpose of giving the impression that it was the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove sent to com- municate the mysteries of the unseen, has long ago been discredited as a childish invention of the enemy yo IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY and could only have been accepted by persons knowing nothing of the ingenuousness and honesty of his character. Mohammed held the Almighty in too much reverence to have claimed direct communion with Him. Like the Hebrew, he declared that no man could see God and live. Consequently, his interviews were al- ways indirect and, as claimed, through the instrumen- tality of Gabriel. It is easy to meet such statements with a shrug of the shoulders and cry " fraud " when there may only be at most self-deception. It is certain, judging from the number of converts and other conditions, — for many of his followers be- gan in illiteracy and semi-barbarity and ended in appre- ciative scholarship and refinement, — that Mohammed was one of the greatest preachers that ever lived, if not the greatest, judging from almost immediate re- sults. Therefore, it is worth while to study his methods. St. Paul talked of the foolishness of preaching, and we, some of us, of the compromise of preaching to men on the street; but Mohammed, in addition to button- hole conferences, nearly always spoke in the open, in the fields, on the hillside, in the road, just as the founder of our religion did, as the primitive Christians did, and among moderns, as Adam Clark, John Wes- ley, and George Wakefield preeminently did, to thou- sands of people and convinced them by hundreds of thousands. It is equally true that Mohammed was a great general as well as preacher and poet, a rare, per- haps unique, combination, and that the Koran, his first MOHAMMED 71 and only effort at composition, is a wonderful book, full of poetry, eloquence, from our viewpoint mean- ingless rhapsody and incomprehensibility, too ; but that may be due to our limitations, to our not having the Oriental mind. ** There are passages in it more sublime than any- thing in Dante or Milton," says Byron, always inter- ested in things Oriental, " and so subtle and profound is much of it that the best minds of the East have found it a text for scholarly and dialectical disserta- tions for centuries; yet the Koran is said to be the least of Mohammed's achievements;" for not litera- ture but righteousness was his strong point. However, this remarkable man accomplished the singular feat of establishing, we may call it, a cult that numbers among its members, according to the latest report of a great French census expert, M. Fornier de Flaix, one-sixth of all the people of the earth. Or, to put it in another way, for every five persons in all known religions, including the most numerous, in their order, — Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, Brahmin- ism, Hindooism, Buddhism, Greek Catholicism, Tao- ism, Judaism, Parsees, Polytheism, and the rest, — for every five persons belonging to all these combined there is one who believes that " God only is God, and Mo- hammed His Prophet." That is their only Creed. Polygamy is not a part of Mohammedan belief. There are many Mohammedans that do not have even one wife, and they do not need to have. It is also true that Islam is growing more rapidly and makes more ^2 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY converts every year by missionaries than all other churches combined. Is not that in itself startling? That such a work of religious construction and unity, — due to the influence of one man speaking but one tongue, and that man an epileptic, — could by any human possibility spring up among a polyglot people is strange and more incompre- hensible than any other event in history, — a mysterious occurrence, indeed, beating against the shores of imagination like waves against the rocks from an un- known sea! Is it not strange, too, that so much of the great work of the world is being, and has been, done by in- valids and handicapped persons ? In our own time, to mention but a few, there are, — Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin, Mrs. Browning, the deaf Professor Bell, inventing the telephone, the sightless Huber, studying bees. And is it not stranger still that the athletic and superb specimens of brawn and health often do so little of enduring value? A sound mind in a sound body does not always im- ply efficiency in the best things. Aristotle and ^sop, Disraeli and Spinoza, and Schiller and Voltaire, " as ugly as Pope and as sickly as Pascal," and the ever active and always heroic St. Paul are instantly occur- ring examples. And many other men of feeble mold, who by their achievements have made the world better, had their ancestral Nemesis in the way of chronic in- validism, without apparent limitation of capacity, while the men who take prizes in athletic events are not MOHAMMED 73 always heard of afterward in higher spheres. The leading member, the brains of the family, is often the cripple, the deformed; the stalwart specimen of manly beauty may be its disgrace. We are so apt in these days of rampant and arro- gant athletics to make health and physical development a fetish, and to long after the flesh-pot of a big biceps, not seeming to realize that to most of us overenlarged muscles would be an incongruity, a defonnity, as un- essential as a tumor or any other abnormal growth. And we are apt to forget too that a manly man, no matter how physically feeble he may be, should not allow the absence of robust health and of muscles like Hercules to stand in the way of a career and active usefulness. Manliness has to do with the mind rather than the muscles. If it had not been for the salutary invincibility of Charles Martel in the eighth century in breaking the victorious line of Mohammedan march '' by breasts,'* as Gibbon says, " like solid ramparts and arms like iron, the Arab might have been lord of the Teuton and Briton to-day. The Koran might have been taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits demonstrating to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet." For the victory of the " Hammer " at Tours over the invading hosts of Islam was one of the decisive battles of the world, and saved Europe to Christianity, to such Christianity as we know to-day, with all its alluring and exhilarating achievements. 74 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY For they were a wildly proselytizing body, hav- ing such an exalted faith in the founder, or rather fosterer of their religion — for Mohammed only claimed to be " in line with the patriarchs and prophets, including Moses and Jesus " — that they even to-day consider as pagans, idolators, giaours, barbarians, infi- dels — the epithets are numerous and never compli- mentary — all who do not believe in him as a servant of God, and that is all he ever pretended to be. He could have been worshiped as a deity had he permitted it; his relics, too, would have worked miracles had he not from the beginning condemned as utterly blas- phemous the sanctification of matter, or anything drawing men's minds from God. In the establishment of the new faith the Prophet's purpose was the obliteration of fetish worship, idolatry, and licentiousness among his countrymen, to all of which they were greatly addicted. Before his time they worshiped clods, stones, hideous idols, and had no responsibility in marriage. Women had no marital rights. They were cast off by former partners without hindrance as you cast off a garment. Pure deism and rigidly limited polygamy — " One, two, or three wives ; but better one," was the formula — were substituted as a protest against brutalizing superstition, idol wor- ship, and unrestrained vice. He would seem at first to have favored monogamy; but finally permitted a rigidly restricted polygamy, as a compromise. These reforms were to have been effected by the pa- cific influence of moral suasion, preaching, exhorting, MOHAMMED 75 and the reduction of the particulars of the faith to writing for universal dissemination. It was only after extreme persecution by the powerful adherents of the old faith, and after he had multitudes of followers that he resorted to arms. Then, unlike Philip, Alexander, Caesar, and other conquerors before and since, the re- wards of service and victory were not worldly emolu- ments, — promotion, place, prominence, — but paradise ! His officers received no pay, and did not, like Chris- tians of the same period, compensate themselves by pillage. Righteousness to man and reverence to God like golden threads are woven into the fabric of Islamism. Benevolence and forbearance are the pillars that sup- port the structure. Abstinence and almsgiving are all essential elements, and so is prayer, which is declared *' the third part of the faith " and " the gate of en- trance into the paradise of the believer." Such were the principal weapons of this epileptic's warfare. CHAPTER Vlil If you want the earth, you get it — when you are dead. But Mohammed won it while hving ; for in his own lifetime he saw his creed triumphant, not only in Arabia, but in many outstanding countries. This is, indeed, unparalleled. That a man, with such odds against him and that man one whose nervous system played tricks with him, should achieve in his own day such vast reforms, not only among his own nation, but among countless races and tribes of lin- guistically diversified peoples, is a victory greater than any recorded in history. It reverses the opinion, too, that a prophet is not without honor save in his own country. So convincing a speaker was Mohammed that his preaching had such an effect upon his heterogeneous millions as to mold them into religious unity, and that, too, as we have said, before his death. Even to-day, no matter how alien your viewpoint, the mere reading of certain excerpts from his composi- tions thrill you as the priests of Delphos were said to be thrilled by reading or hearing the oracles. But there is no duplicity in Mohammed's discourses: they are often as luminous as light and as candid as the criti- cism of a child. Yet they have sufficient mystery, too, to make them alluring to the greatest minds. It was 76 MOHAMMED ^^ Sir Joshua who said — see his " Lectures on Paint- ing " — that " mystery is an essential element of the sublime." The Koran abounds in this quality. So implicitly was Mohammed obeyed that his fol- lowers not only abstained from all inebriating fluids because he simply said they did more harm than good, but they did not even make use of the proceeds from the sale of intoxicating liquors or even of grapes, be- cause they were used in making such intoxicants. Mohammedan condemnation of games of chance, be- cause of the Prophet's objection to them, is so final that they not only abstain from gambling themselves, but condemn it to such an extent that the testimony of gamblers is invalid in courts of justice. Games of skill, such as chess, are permitt