"Epilepsy is among the commonest of the profound nervous disorders. The name is made to apply to the convulsions that depend upon certain organic brain lesions. Convulsions very much like those of epilepsy are due to tumours and abscesses of the brain, and are attendant upon certain acute diseases, as cerebro-spinal fever, pneumonia and certain exanthemata; but, while the convulsions of the convulsions of the diseases may be epileptoid in character they are in no sense epileptic seizures. The latter are due to cortical lesions and follow a chronic course. They are influenced by heredity, age, sex, mechanical injuries, certain diseased conditions of the brain and spinal cord and irritation of the cortical substance. Seizures very like epilepsy and difficult to differentiate from the true disease depend also upon hysteria and various extreme neuroses. It is very hard to discover the lesions that cause epilepsy, is seeming to be dependent upon a certain degree of irritability either of the nerve centres of nerve cells, or upon an unstable state of the nervous system generally.
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