On the Sacred Disease is a work of the Hippocratic Corpus, written in 400 BCE. The authorship of this piece can not be confirmed and is therefore regarded as dubious. The treatise is thought to contain one of the first recorded observations of epilepsy in humans. The author explains these phenomena by the flux of the phlegm flowing from the brain into the veins rather than assigning them a divine origin. This turn from a supernatural to a naturalistic explanation is considered a major break in the history of medicine.
The author, putatively Hippocrates, comments on the “sacred” disease declaring that it is no more sacred than other diseases. He stresses the importance of the disease having no relation with the divine whatsoever, but instead being purely of human origin. The author of On the Sacred Disease argues that even the most mysterious of diseases was still of natural cause and not of divine origin:
“Men regard its nature and cause as divine from ignorance and wonder because it is not at all like to other diseases…Men being in want of the means of life, invent many and various things, and devise many contrivances for all other things and for this disease, in every phase of the disease, assigning the cause to a god…Neither truly do I count it a worth opinion to hold that the body of man is polluted by god, the most impure by the most holy,”
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Author: Wikipedia
Keywords: Sacred disease, Epilepsy, Epileptic, Hippocrates, Spirit of epilepsy, Demon possession, Madness, Epileptic seizure, Devil possessed, Possessed by demons, Evil spirit
Bible reference(s): Matthew 4:24, Matthew 17:15, Mark 9:17-18, Mark 9:20-22, Luke 9:39, Luke 9:42
Source: This article uses material from the Wikipedia article “On the Sacred Disease,” which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0.
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