His epilepsy had a huge influence on his writings and his perception of the world. Dostoevsky suffered from epilepsy for a major part of his life, and he maintained detailed accounts of his seizures. In the course of this paper, the author will specifically focus on Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, in which the reader sees the author’s personal view of epilepsy, cleverly accommodated into the character of Prince Myshkin, who is surrounded by social stigmatisation. This paper will examine how medical and non-medical discourses shaped the representation of epilepsy and contributed to the cultural mythology surrounding epilepsy. However, even till the late nineteenth century, medical narratives were intertwined with the fictional narratives that surrounded epilepsy, and these narratives contributed significantly towards the stigma that has historically been associated with the disease. The Hippocratic physicians were among the first to attempt to separate the scientific and. Later, Areatus was also one of the people who called the disease ‘sacred’ according to them, a deity had sent a demon to possess the patient, or the patient had been cursed by the moon.
Around 400 BC, Areatus - one of Hippocrates’ pupils, proclaimed ‘epilepsy is an illness of various shapes and horrible’.
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