We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
The basic science of epilepsy made fundamental advances in this period, with the discovery of GABA as the chief inhibitory transmitter and glutamate as the chief excitatory transmitter involved in epilepsy. This spurred intensive research by the pharmaceutical companies and the introduction of a range of new drug treatments, although none were shown to be of superior efficacy to those already existing. Extraordinary progress was made also in the basic science of genetics, although this did not feed into clinical epilepsy. The major investigational advances were CT and then MRI scanning, which transformed clinical practice in epilepsy, and also EEG technologies allowing prolonged monitoring and video-EEG correlation. The number of clinical researchers in epilepsy greatly increased, stimulated by changing university and hospital priorities and the technological advances of the computing era. Advances were made in many clinical fields in epilepsy, including epidemiology, paediatrics, epilepsy syndromes, febrile convulsions and their relationship to temporal lobe epilepsy, SUDEP and status epilepticus. Aided by therapeutic drug monitoring, antiseizure drug monotherapy became commonplace. New drugs and new surgical techniques were introduced. An attempt was made to federate ILAE and IBE under the umbrella of a new organisation, Epilepsy International, but this failed.
Epilepsy has a fascinating history. To the medical historian Oswei Temkin it was 'the paradigm of the suffering of both body and soul in disease'. It is justifiably considered a window on brain function. And yet its story is more than simply a medical narrative, but one influenced also by scientific, societal and personal themes. Written for a medical and non-medical readership, this book describes the major developments in epilepsy between 1860–2020, a turbulent era in which science dominated as an explanatory model, medical theories and practices steered an erratic course, and societal attitudes and approaches to epilepsy fluctuated dramatically. In the middle of this maelstrom was the person with epilepsy at the mercy of social attitudes and legislation, and at times harmed as well as helped by medicine and science. So entangled is the history that intriguingly, as an entity, epilepsy may now be thought not even to exist.
Recommend this
Email your librarian or administrator to recommend adding this to your organisation's collection.