The scientific study of the clinical picture of epilepsy was not one of continuous development.

People knew less about epilepsy in the Middle Ages than they did during the lifetime of the Greek physician Hippocrates, who had lived more than 1500 years before!

Hardly any other disease has been given so many different names in the course of history as epilepsy has.

From this we can conclude that throughout the ages people have been preoccupied with this disease. There are two main reasons for this interest:

Firstly, epilepsy has always been a common disease: 0,5-1% of all people suffer from it.

Secondly, the image with which epilepsy is usually associated - the grand mal attack - arouses feelings of fear and horror. People have always tried to put these feelings into words.

In addition to this, epilepsy can have very different symptoms, all of which need to be described and given a name.

This naming of a person, an object and also an illness was in former centuries of much greater importance than it is today.

To be able to give someone a name or to find out the name of someone else meant having power over that person, whereas the inability to name something was tantamount to being powerless (as in the phrase "unspeakable misery").
Thus, people believed or hoped that if they could give a name to a disease, they would not fall victim to it.

From the various names which a disease is given over time, we can deduce what the people in each period thought about its cause (e.g. "lunatism" - a disorder caused by the phases of the moon; "daemonic suffering": brought about by evil spirits).

At the same time, the names can also tell us about the people who gave them and their beliefs (e.g. "the scourge of Christ": the person who gave this name to epilepsy definitely believed in Christ and his power to punish).

By looking at the different names which epilepsy was given throughout the ages, it is possible to piece together some of the medical, cultural and social history surrounding this disease.

One example for this theory is the ancient Egyptian name for epilepsy "nesejet", which is explained in more detail here.

spoken hieroglyphics	silent hieroglyphics
wave line: n bales of fabric: s 2 reed leaves: j loaf of bread: t	cobra: "comming from God" man with stick: "Danger" Source: H. Schneble: Krankheit der ungezählten Namen. Huber-Verlag Bern, 1987, p. 9-11

To the ancient Egyptians the term 'nsjt' (= nesejet = epilepsy) signified a disease which was sent by the gods and which was extremely dangerous.

There were no special institutions for people with epilepsy in Germany until the second half of the 19th century.
Where it was not possible for people with epilepsy to be cared for in their family, either because their seizures were too serious or too frequent or because they had some additional mental or physical handicap, they were put in prisons, "lunatic asylums" or former leprosoria places where people with leprosy could live).

The first home for "epileptics" in Germany was opened by Dr H.A. Reimer in Görlitz in 1855.

In 1862 a special institution for people with epilepsy was opened near Tettnang on Lake Constance, called the "Heil- und Bewahrungsanstalt für Epileptische auf der Pfingstweide". In 1867 a nursing home for epileptic boys was set up near Bielefeld. This was the foundation stone on which the epilepsy centre Bethel was later erected.

In 1892 the "Heil- und Pflegeanstalt für epileptische Kinder" (Nursing Home for Epileptic Children) was inaugurated in Kork.

›› Kork "Schloss"

France had led the way in this development and set up the "Hôpital de la Salpêtrière" in the former saltpetre storage depot of a gunpowder factory in Paris. As early as the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century, mentally ill people and people with epilepsy were able to get proper treatment and care here.

Throughout the 19th century, the "Salpêtrière" (for women) and the "Hospice de Bicêtre" for men, which was later built on, developed into respected centres for people with epilepsy and those with neurological and mental disorders.

The persecution of people with epilepsy

During the Third Reich, most people, including doctors, regarded the 'falling sickness' as a hereditary disease. It is unclear whether the doctors were blinded by the theories of racial hygiene or whether they did not have the medical knowledge to know any better.

During this time, the doctor at the Kork institution believed that 80% of all the people who lived in the home suffered from the 'hereditary falling sickness.'

Some of the most inhuman actions of the National Socialists in the Third Reich were the measures to insure racial hygiene, one of which was the 'Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases' which was passed by the government of the Reich on July 14th 1933.

Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases

§ 1
People who suffer from a hereditary disease can be made infertile surgically (sterilised), if the knowledge gained from medical science points to the probability that the offspring will suffer from severe physical or mental hereditary damage.

The law views people as suffering from a hereditary disease if they have the following:

1. congenital mental deficiency,
2. schizophrenia,
3. circular (manic depressive) insanity,
4. hereditary falling sickness,
5. hereditary Huntington's Disease,
6. hereditary blindness,
7. hereditary deafness,
8. severe hereditary physical deformity.

People suffering from severe alcoholism can also be sterilised.

This law came into effect in 1934.

This law gave people the legal opportunity to sterilise people with epilepsy (compulsory sterilisation). According to information from the German Ministry of Justice, about 350,000 people (including many suffering from epilepsy) were sterilised. In the Kork institutions, a total of 102 sterilisations were carried out between 1934 and 1939.

This law and the way it was put into practice not only stood in stark contrast to all morality and humanity,it also contradicted in many ways medical experience and knowledge.

For instance, epilepsy is not a hereditary disease (with the exception of very distinct forms of epilepsy which have only been observed in a small number of families world wide).
In most cases, epilepsy is caused by the combination of an existing individual disposition to the disease and an exogenous (outside) trigger, e.g. an accident, infection or circulatory disturbance.
(For this reason genetic therapy will not play a major role in the treatment of epilepsy in the future.)

The extermination of people with epilepsy

›› Berlin, Tier- gartenstrasse 4