Knowledge of Ancients

[460 BC- 357 BC ; Hippocrates]

We were healthy and happy children on Holiday in the country...
I (just a small child) can never forget playing along the hillside with my best friend when suddenly, she began to shake, somewhat like a convulse. Little to my knowledge at the time, she had had her first seizure. This was something, sadly, I could never forget.

I also will never understand just how I knew what to do, or how it was that I, at sixty pounds, carried her down from the hill. Thank goodness she was alright, but I could not help but fear that her life would change forever. I was told that some things will happen, that just cannot be explained…

That was twenty years ago, but in the immediate years to follow, there were concerns about her participation in sports, lengthy travel, and basically, many activities were guarded. She and I read texts, and every article we came across, including the Ancients, who (it was thought) had also experienced this, in their societies.

The story is at a happy ending, as even in the last several years, societies, foundations, and researchers have brought forth new treatments. There is not the fear and circumstance today, that we grew up with, then. I wanted to share this with you, as I have just come across an article...

The article speaks about an Australian neurologist, Terence O'Brien who traced back to ancient diagnosis (twenty-five centuries ago) when Hippocrates suggested a relationship between epilepsy and depression, only to find this important medical connection.

"Melancholics ordinarily become epileptics, and epileptics melancholics,"
-Hippocrates; fifth century BC.

From today's article | October 17, 2005:
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Professor O'Brien said brain scans of 26 patients with temporal lobe epilepsy had found those with depression had an abnormality in a part of the brain known as the orbitofrontal cortex. "That's an important part of the brain that's involved in the circuitry controlling stress hormones," he said.
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His research has just received an international brain research award to enable further studies, and those forthcoming... Article here.

The Knowledge of Hippocrates: The first physician known who actually considered medicine to be a science, and to be separate from religion. He wrote the Hippocratic oath.. (An oath that every new doctor-to-be still says to this day.)


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