Retrospective Diagnosis
The following people were not diagnosed with epilepsy during their lifetime. A retrospective diagnosis is speculative and, as detailed below, can be wrong.
| Name | Life | Comments | Reference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Socrates | 470–399 BC | Ancient Greek philosopher. It is speculated that his daimonion was a simple partial seizure and that he had temporal lobe epilepsy. | |
| Julius Caesar | 100–44 BC | Roman military and political leader. He had four documented episodes of what were probably complex partial seizures. He may additionally have had absence seizures in his youth. There is family history of epilepsy amongst his ancestors and descendants. The earliest accounts of these seizures were made by the biographer Suetonius who was born after Caesar's death. | |
| Elizabeth Monroe | 1768–1830 | The wife of James Monroe, fifth President of the United States. Some historians believe her illness was epilepsy. She is reported to have been prone to convulsions and was once seriously burnt after falling into a fireplace. | |
| Napoleon I of France | 1769–1821 | French military leader and emperor. A paper by William Osler in 1903 stated, "The slow pulse of Napoleon rests upon tradition; it has been suggested that his epilepsy and attacks of apathy may have been associated features in a chronic form of Stokes-Adams disease", which implies the seizures were not epileptic in origin. However, in 2003, John Hughes concluded that Napoleon had both psychogenic attacks due to stress and epileptic seizures due to chronic uremia from a severe urethral stricture caused by gonorrhea. | |
| Harriet Tubman | 1820-22 – 1913 | An African-American abolitionist. Developed what was probably epilepsy as a result of a head injury. | |
| George Gershwin | 1898–1937 | American composer. The first symptoms of his glioblastoma multiforme tumor were probably olfactory-uncinate simple partial seizures. He noticed the smell of burnt rubber at the same time as dizziness or, occasionally, brief blackouts. His condition deteriorated and he died six months later, despite surgery to remove the tumor. | |
| Philip K. Dick | 1928–1982 | A science fiction writer. One biographer suggests temporal lobe epilepsy as a possible cause of his visions, but also regards such speculation as futile and unverifiable. |
Read more about this topic: List Of People With Epilepsy