And this brings me to the question of what can be done, or rather what can parents do to promote recovery from epilepsy. First of all, do not listen to what you may hear about this medicine or the other being a specific for it. There is no specific whatever for epilepsy, but there are certain remedies which in skilful hands do have a real though limited power to control the frequency and lessen the severity of the attacks. Next, there are cases in which the attacks depend on some definite cause; it may be indigestion, or constipation, or the cutting of the second set of teeth, and on the irritation produced by those teeth being too crowded. Thus, I remember a boy twelve years old, in whom two severe epileptic fits occurred apparently without cause. He was cutting his back grinding teeth, and in the lower jaw the teeth seemed overcrowded. I had a tooth extracted on either side, the fits ceased, and when I last heard of him many years afterwards they had not returned.
Epilepsy often lasts for many years, and no one's memory is retentive enough to be trusted with all the details between the different attacks, the causes which seemed to produce them, the measures which appeared at different times to be of service. I am therefore accustomed to advise people, any of whose children have the misfortune to be epileptic, to write as brief an account as possible of the child's previous history, and to supplement it by a daily record kept in parallel columns of date, food, state of bowels, sleep, medicine, attacks, specifying their character and duration; and general remarks, which would bear on the child's temper and general condition, and in which column any probable exciting cause of an attack would be recorded. It is surprising how much important information is gathered in a few months from such a record kept faithfully.
The diet should be mild, nutritious, but as a general rule unstimulating; and should include meat comparatively seldom, and in small quantities. Some fifty years ago, a very distinguished American physician, Dr. Jackson of Boston, in the United States, insisted very strongly on the importance of a diet exclusively of milk and vegetables in greatly lessening the frequency and severity of epileptic attacks. I believe in the great majority of cases of epilepsy in childhood Dr. Jackson's advice is worth following. And I may add that, while I have little faith in the influence of mere drugs, I have a yearly increasing confidence in that of judicious management, mental and moral, as well as physical.