The list of famous authors and playwrights whom historians believe had epilepsy is overwhelming. It includes: Dante, the author of The Divine Comedy, who is not only Italy's pre-eminent poet but one of the towering figures of Western literature; Moliere, the master comic dramatist of the eighteenth century whose plays Tartuffe, The Imaginary Invalid and The Misanthrope are still being regularly performed today; Sir Walter Scott, one of the foremost literary figures of the romantic period whose books like Ivanhoe and Waverley remain widely read classics; the 18th century English satirist Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver's Travels; the nineteenth century American author Edgar Allan Poe; as well as three of the greatest English Romantic poets, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Alfred Lord Tennyson.

Tennyson's "waking trances" began in adolescence, and as a young man he was diagnosed with epilepsy, which ran in the Tennyson family. British doctors of that era were reluctant to report epilepsy in respected families because they thought seizures arose from the genitals and masturbation was the cause of epilepsy! In fact, up until the nineteenth century, one of the extreme approaches to epilepsy was castration for men or clitoridectomy for women, which were thought to work by ending masturbation. Tennyson's doctor recommended European spas where the poet's epilepsy 'treatment' consisted of drinking large amounts of water, walking long distances in bad weather, and being submersed, wrapped in sheets, into cold baths.

Tennyson's seizures involved a loss of the sense of self. Describing these mystic visions, he wrote:

Charles Dickens, the Victorian author of such classic books as A Christmas Carol and Oliver Twist had epilepsy, as did several of the characters in his books. The medical accuracy of Dickens's descriptions of epilepsy has amazed the doctors who read him today.

Lewis Carroll, in his famous stories Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, was probably writing about his own temporal lobe seizures. The very sensation initiating Alice' adventures- that of falling down a hole- is a familiar one to many people with seizures. Alice often feels that her own body (or the objects around her) is shrinking or growing before her eyes, another seizure symptom. Carroll recorded his seizures, which were followed by prolonged headaches and feeling not his usual self, in his journal.

From his writings we know a lot about the epilepsy of the great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, author of such classics as Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, who is considered by many to have brought the Western novel to the peak of its possibilities.

Dostoevsky had his first seizure at age nine. After a remission which lasted up to age 25, he had seizures every few days or months, fluctuating between good and bad periods. His ecstatic auras occurring seconds before his bigger seizures were moments of transcendent happiness, which then changed to an anguished feeling of dread. He saw a blinding flash of light, then would cry out and lose consciousness for a second or two. Sometimes the epileptic discharge generalized across his brain, producing a secondary tonic-clonic (grand mal) seizure. Afterward he could not recall events and conversations that had occurred during the seizure, and he often felt depressed, guilty and irritable for days. Epilepsy is a central source of themes, personalities, and events in his books; he gave epilepsy to about 30 of his characters.

The other great nineteenth century Russian author, Count Leo Tolstoy, author of Anna Karenina and War and Peace, also had epilepsy.

Modern doctors have diagnosed Gustave Flaubert, the nineteenth century French literary genius who wrote such masterpieces as Madame Bovary and A Sentimental Education, with "complex partial epilepsy of occipital-temporal origin, secondary to lesion of the left posterior hemisphere with occasional secondary generalization of seizures." Flaubert's typical seizure began with a feeling of impending doom, after which he felt his sense of self grow insecure, as if he had been transported into another dimension. He wrote that his seizures arrived as "a whirlpool of ideas and images in my poor brain, during which it seemed that my consciousness, that my me sank like a vessel in a storm." He moaned, had a rush of memories, saw fiery hallucinations, foamed at the mouth, moved his right arm automatically, fell into a trance of about ten minutes, and vomited. His father, a doctor, ordered him to take regular bleedings with leeches. Flaubert abandoned these useless treatments and resigned himself to live with his epilepsy.

Flaubert gave features of these seizures (none described as epilepsy) to various characters, including the heroine of Madame Bovary, who falls into a stupor while crossing a field, and the title character in his book The Temptation of St. Anthony.

Continue on to World leaders with epilepsy.

Adapted with permission from Epilepsy Toronto

Topic Editor: Steven C. Schachter, M.D.
Last Reviewed:12/28/06