Samuel Tissot's Traité de l'épilepsie-250 years old

Abstract

A quarter of a millennium ago, Samuel Tissot (1728-1797), a Swiss physician who had achieved a substantial European reputation, authored a monograph entitled Traité de l'épilepsie. The book was translated into several European languages and appeared in various editions over the following 70 years, although an English-language version was never published. In his Traité, Tissot provided a thorough account and critical analysis of the previous relevant literature concerning epilepsy, added data from his own experience in practice, and raised issues, some of which remain important today. The appearance of the book was propitious, occurring during the period of the European Enlightenment, when medicine was increasingly divesting itself of ancient modes of thinking and veneration for the opinions of great names from the remote past. At least in Western Europe, the Traité de l'épilepsie became an intellectual launching pad for the considerable expansion in knowledge of epilepsy that occurred over the century or longer that followed its publication.

Keywords: Classification of causes; Samuel Tissot; de Sauvages; epilepsy; seizures.