Hippocratic Corpus on the “Sacred Illness” (epilepsy) and treatment as commerce

It is “in no way more divine or sacred than other illness, but it has its own nature and, just as the other illnesses have a condition from which they arise, this illness also has a natural cause.” People impute sacredness to it simply because “it is nothing like other illnesses. . . . But if it is wondrous, on this count there will be many sacred illnesses and not one” (Upson-Saia, 195). Those who first imputed sacredness to this illness were “people of the sort who are now magicians, purifiers, charlatans, and quacks, who pretended to be deeply god-fearing and to have superior knowledge.” In point of fact, they were, and are, “impious and believe that the gods neither exist nor have any power” (197), “people in need of a livelihood contrive and fabricate strategies of all sorts for this illness and other things, attributing to a god the cause of each type of conation” (197).