It is true that much
importance here is attached to those minor forms of epilepsy which
involve no gross and obvious convulsive fit. The existence of these
minor attacks is, in the case of men of genius, usually difficult to
disprove and equally difficult to prove. It certainly should not be so
as regards the major form of epilepsy. Yet among the thousand and
thirty persons of British genius I was only able to find epilepsy
mentioned twice, and in both cases incorrectly, for the National
Biographer had attributed it to Lord Herbert of Cherbury through
misreading a passage in Herbert's _Autobiography_, while the epileptic
fits of Sir W.R. Hamilton in old age were most certainly not true
epilepsy. Without doubt, no eugenist could recommend an epileptic to
become a parent. But if epilepsy has no existence in British men of
genius it is improbable that it has often occurred among their parents.
The loss to British genius through eugenic activity in this sphere
would probably, therefore, have been _nil_.
Putting aside British genius, however, one finds that it has been
almost a commonplace of alienists and neurologists, even up to the
present day, to present glibly a formidable list of mighty men of
genius as victims of epilepsy. Thus I find a well-known American
alienist lately making the unqualified and positive statement that
"Mahomet, Napoleon, Moliere, Handel, Paganini, Mozart, Schiller,
Richelieu, Newton and Flaubert" were epileptics, while still more
recently a distinguished English neurologist, declaring that "the
world's history has been made by men who were either epileptics,
insane, or of neuropathic stock," brings forward a similar and still
larger list to illustrate that statement, with Alexander the Great,
Julius Caesar, the Apostle Paul, Luther, Frederick the Great and many
others thrown in, though unfortunately he fails to tell us which
members of the group he desires us to regard as epileptic.
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