After some few minutes, very rarely hours, a pacification ensues, and abdication of the epileptic demon; and the patient liberated, rises up of his own accord, languid, dejected, and ashamed, with but few traces on the memory of the preceding tragedy; and nearly in the exercise of all his usual faculties; which is not the case in apoplexy. In the severity and duration, but still more in the repetition of the paroxisms, there is prodigious variation: in some they are erratick and irregular; in others, they are periodical; and at various intervals in diurnal paroxisms, synchronous with the tides; monthly with the lunar revolutions; equinoctial; annual. It is often a chronic disease, and then, much less inimical to life than might be expected from such a universal commotion. But in infancy, epilepsy and convulsions are the most atrocious of the morbid murderers. Sometimes it ceases after puberty. In old persons, or where there is no previous warning of the approaching paroxisms, the prospects are deplorable: reiterated epileptic bombardment often makes breaches in the internal recesses of the senses; hence insanity, apoplexy, palsy, idiotism. Authors have attempted the diagnosticks of epileptic origin: thus, in the brain, or its spinal elongation, it is represented as invading with stupidity, or hebetude of the internal and external senses; headach, disturbed sleep, pale face; with suddenness in the assault, without previous warning, and a sort of sensation of distillation from the head to the breast and stomach: from nervous sympathy of the stomach and intestines, and of the extremities, it is preceded by disturbance of those parts at the approaching paroxism; by an aura epileptica, and ascending vapour, or extraordinary sensation originating from some fixed point. To conclude, this convulsion is sometimes feigned by begging impostors.
The predisposing and occasional _causes_ are, hereditary, peculiar original organization, especially of the brain and its appendages: plethora, fright, terror, horror, anxiety and passions of mind, excess of venery, study; passionate drunken nurses; foul stomach; acidity, acrid bile; worms, dentition, scald head, or ulcers rashly dried up or repelled; external injuries of the head; various diseases within the brain, or in the nervous chords; ebriety; difficult parturition; hystericks; cachexy, dregs of intermittent fevers; irritability and sensibility in morbid extreme; nervous sympathy and motory vibrations; force of habit; offensive odours; poisons, narcoticks. In those of epileptic temperament and predisposition, paroxisms are liable to be recalled by heat, ventricular crudity, intoxication, anxiety and passions of mind, terror, prospect of precipices, &c.