AUTHOR=Reynolds Edward Henry 

TITLE=Epilepsy and Neuroscience: Evolution and Interaction

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Neuroanatomy

VOLUME=Volume 14 - 2020

YEAR=2020

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neuroanatomy/articles/10.3389/fnana.2020.00025

DOI=10.3389/fnana.2020.00025

ISSN=1662-5129

ABSTRACT=Neuroscience is a relatively new and fashionable word which emerged in the 1950’s in several countries, including the UK, to describe a multidisciplinary clinical and laboratory approach to the study of brain, mind and neuropsychiatric disorders. However collaborative study of neurological and psychiatric disorders can be traced to the 17th century with roots in antiquity. I describe the evolution of our understanding of epilepsy beginning with the first detailed clinical descriptions, associated with supernatural theories, in Babylonian medicine in the second millennium BC. Interest in natural causation arose in the Greco-Roman period when it was first suggested that “the sacred disease” was a disorder of the brain. However this theory did not take root until the 17th and 18th centuries AD when epilepsy began to be separated from other “convulsive” diseases, including hysteria. In the 19th century the controversial separation of idiopathic from symptomatic epilepsies began and continues to influence international classifications of seizures and epilepsies. Also in the 19th century the concept of seizures as electrical discharges in the brain evolved, reinforced in the 20th century by the discovery of the electroencephalogram. For many reasons people with epilepsy have experienced a high incidence of cognitive and psychosocial disorders. Epilepsy, which is a global problem, has therefore remained a bridge between neurology and psychiatry. Furthermore the study of epilepsy continues to shed light on brain function and on other neuropsychiatric disorders.