"Describe," he instructs himself, "what sneezing is, what yawning is, the falling sickness, spasm, paralysis, shivering with cold, sweating, fatigue, hunger, sleep, thirst, lust".
Since the falling sickness, as epilepsy used to be known, had shaming associations with "hysteria", masturbation, syphilis and impairment of the intellect leading to "epileptic insanity", it was unnameable, particularly when it struck a woman.
The plot centres on a lying contest, in which 'Pothecary tells how he cured a young woman of the falling sickness by giving her an enema, securing it in her bottom with a bung.
Suetonius said that Caligula suffered from "falling sickness", or epilepsy, when he was young.
After a period of falling sickness absence in Sweden during the 1990s, there was a rapid increase from 1997 through 2002 that was steeper in women than in men.
Garff does some fascinating detective work in investigating the possibility of the "falling sickness" as Kierkegaard's shameful infirmity and the cause, as with Dostoyevsky, of his fits of exaltation and of his graphomania.
There have been falls, sicknesses, and worse.
"We have 200 more sick and falling sick every day; the sickness is yellow fever, small-pox and in short everything else that can be mentioned.
This is a quintessentially English retreat built to commemorate the British dead who fell "by sickness and sword' in the first battle of Afghanistan.
When the bombs fell, radiation sickness was not understood, and people feared it was contagious.
They helped when a parent lost a job, ran away to his or her home country, or fell into sickness or depression.
