Epilepsy is a progressive disease characterised by the occurrence of reiterated unprovoked paroxysmal disorders (convulsive and non-convulsive), as well as special personality changes with the stiffness of thinking and affect, development of acute and protracted psychoses, and formation of bradyphrenic type1 imbecility at later stages of the disease.
For epilepsy, psychopathological disorders are closely got mixed up with neurological and somatic ones, so that ICD-10 classifies this disease as a neurological one (G40).
Epilepsy, or falling sickness, is known since antiquity and has got its name (from the Greek επιλαβυω - "to be suddenly seized, to fall") due to sudden onset of convulsive seizures, while patients fall as if cut down in convulsions shaking their whole body. Hippocrates (the 5th century B.C.) was the first to have affirmed that this disease, which was called "sacred" (morbus saccer), was caused by a cerebral disease, and divine forces are not of any importance in its origin. Egyptians had noted of "moon sickness". Arabs knew ways of treating the convulsive disease that overtakes people on a new moon. The falling disease was noted in animals too.
Aretaeus from Cappadocia (the 1st century A.D.) described some types of epileptic non-convulsive paroxysms and imbecility, and Caelias Aurelianus recommended general health-improving remedies for treatment. Claudius Galen (the 2nd century A.D.) considered that there were different types of epilepsy: idiopathic (genuine, primary) and symptomatic (secondary) ones. The opposition of these types was confirmed by studies of scientists in the 18th-20th centuries. J.P. Falret (1794-1870) was the first to do not have ted that personality changes typical for epilepsy with intermittent mental reactions in the sphere of feeling and temper, shortness of temper and a disposition to dreary attacks can be present in people who did not have convulsive attacks; he called this variant of the disease masked, latent epilepsy (epilpsie larvée, French, 1861).