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“Others are absent also. Ibni, to whom good riddance. And the scribe—you remember Hotepek—left a week before harvesting began. His child has the falling sickness. Hotepek is taking her to Abydos to the priest of Ra there. Rekh fashioned a little amulet from the sweep for her, so the priests might say their spells over it. Meanwhile we have a new scribe.”

When Ms. Boyle directed “Julius Caesar” her first year, she and the cast spoke often about how Caesar has epilepsy, “the falling sickness,” and how his confusion could be a result of a postictal state, the time following a seizure.

It wasn’t so long ago that tuberculosis was known as “consumption” and epilepsy was “falling sickness.”

“Your sister has the falling sickness,” he said.

In Scotland strange and weird customs linger, and Sir H. G. Reid in his entertaining volume, “’Tween Gloamin’ and the Mirk,” has related how he himself, during infancy, underwent a mysterious cure for the “falling sickness.”