Seized: Temporal Lobe Epilepsy as a Medical, Historical, and Artistic Phenomenon [Paperback]

Eve LaPlante (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 14, 2000 | ISBN-10: 0595094317 | ISBN-13: 978-0595094318

"Fascinating account of medical research...LaPlante shows how a brain scar may cause bizarre aggressive or sexual behavior-and works of profound creative imagination."

-Howard Gardner

"Readers intrigued by Oliver Sacks' Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat will welcome LaPlante's book...Thoughtful...Highly recommended."

-Library Journal

"LaPlante's descriptions of the human brain are wonderfully concrete, and her empathy for epilepsy's victims is clear."

-Kirkus Review

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) is the most widespread form of epilepsy among adults, yet TLE seizures are not easily recognized, unlike the far better known convulsions of grand mal epilepsy. In this major study, freelance journalist LaPlante, who interviewed scores of patients and doctors, explores a disease that may affect between one and two million Americans. During a TLE seizure, a person is overcome by powerful emotions, hallucinations, or vivid flashbacks. Some TLE sufferers perform automatic or violent acts; others exhibit hyper-religiosity or altered sexuality. LaPlante reviews the ordeals of Dostoevsky, van Gogh, Lewis Carroll and other luminaries thought to have suffered TLE. She also graphically profies three ordinary TLE patients--Charlie, a lawyer minimally affected by the disease; Jill, a personnel director whose confidence has been shattered by her seizures; and Gloria, a retired hairdresser. If TLE often gets misdiagnosed as schizophrenia or mood disorder, as LaPlante suggests, the implications for psychiatry are staggering.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

The many readers who were intrigued by Oliver Sacks's The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat ( LJ 2/15/86) will welcome LaPlante's book. More common yet less familiar than the physical manifestations of grand mal epilepsy, temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) is a response to abnormal electrical activity in the parts of the brain controlling feeling and memory. In TLE seizures, a patient experiences uncontrollable, intense emotions, sensory hallucinations, and vivid memories. Unlike grand mal epilepsy, the intervals between seizures are often marked by a common pattern of personality changes, typically including compulsive writing or drawing and hyper-religiosity. LaPlante interweaves the stories of three contemporary sufferers with accounts of famous people who probably had the disease, including Vincent Van Gogh, Soren Kierkegaard, and Lewis Carroll. Does the development of anticonvulsant drugs preclude another Alice in Wonderland ? A thoughtful final chapter examines TLE's conjunction of personality and physiology and its impact on our concepts of personhood, creativity, and free will. Highly recommended for all libraries.
- Kathy Arsenault, Univ. of South Florida-St. Petersburg Lib.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: iUniverse (June 14, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0595094317
• ISBN-13: 978-0595094318
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #109,634 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #11 in Books > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Disorders & Diseases > Epilepsy
  • #91 in Books > Medical Books > Research

More About the Author

Eve LaPlante, a New Englander with degrees from Princeton and Harvard, has published articles, essays, and three nonfiction books.

SEIZED is a narrative portrait of a common brain disorder that can alter personality, illuminating the mind-body problem and the limits of free will. AMERICAN JEZEBEL tells the true story of Eve's ancestor the colonial heretic and founding mother Anne Hutchinson.

Eve's second ancestor biography, SALEM WITCH JUDGE, about the 1692 judge who became a feminist and an abolitionist, won the 2008 Massachusetts Book Award for Nonfiction.

She is working on a biography of Louisa May Alcott and her mother, Abigail, for Free Press.

Shaun O'Connell, in his new anthology, BOSTON: VOICES & VISIONS, which includes the preface to AMERICAN JEZEBEL, observes, "Just as Nathaniel Hawthorne dug into the dark history of his ancestry, which reached back both to the original Boston settlement of the 1630s and the Salem Witch Trials of the 1690s, so too did LaPlante trace family members who were rooted in the same eras.... Hawthorne took shame upon himself for the misdeeds of his Puritan ancestors, and LaPlante offers praise for her forebears who testified against Puritan repression. As her prefaces to these biographies, a kind of spiritual autobiography, show, Anne Hutchinson and Samuel Sewall were not the dark Puritans many imagined them to be. They remain living presences, even models of rectitude, into the twenty-first century."

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars If you have TLE, read this book!, June 21, 2005

By 

Spacedoubt "craft addict" (Left Coast, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Seized (Hardcover)

I have had temporal lobe epilepsy for as long as I can remember. My seizures started when I was a baby. I have always had tonic clonic seizures, too, but not until I was an adult did I even learn that the other unusual experiences that I was having were complex partial and simple partial seizures. I was afraid to ask other people if they also had these strange experiences, but they didn't appear to.

After I was diagnosed with TLE I found other people with epilepsy to talk to online. For the first time ever, I knew that I was not the only person on earth who lived this way. Some of the feelings of isolation subsided. Then someone recommended Eve La Plante's book. I am so grateful. I think that a person who has TLE will have a different experience when they read this book than other people will. For me, and others who have written about it on forums related to epilepsy on the internet, it is a revelation. It is an affirmation. It offers some explanation. It has been a moving experience.

To read it and recognize some of the traits of Geschwind's syndrome in myself was a relief, in a way. People who don't have epilepsy seem to think that it only involves occasional convulsions, but the truth is that a person with epilepsy, and certainly TLE, is affected by it every minute of their lives. The research discussed in this book acknowledges and confirms that and offers an explanation. Yes, I am different, and this is why. Oddly, I am relieved.

So many books about epilepsy are written from the perspective of a doctor, a doctor lecturing the patient and their family. 'This is what you must do, this is what you must never do, you're just going to have to accept that you can't do that.' If you have read one, you've read them all, really. It comes across in a condescending way, and for those of us who were not diagnosed recently, they're not very helpful. Seized is different. It goes deeper. It's not intended to be a textbook or an introduction to life with epilepsy. It discusses more interesting things than 'Don't swim alone.' It provides insight into the connection between brain structure and personality. As a person with TLE, I found this book to be a fascinating, exhilerating read. I highly recommend it.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A magnificent work of literary journalism, October 27, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Seized: Temporal Lobe Epilepsy as a Medical, Historical, and Artistic Phenomenon (Paperback)

Seized, by Eve LaPlante, is a magnificent work of literary journalism in the style and spirit of Tracy Kidder and John McPhee. It deals with a common, but still not widely known form of epilepsy that affects as many as a million people in the United States. The author describes ordinary patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE), medical pioneers who elucidated the disorder (these descriptions are quite fascinating), as well as a number of famous artists and writers, including Lewis Carroll, Vincent van Gogh, Edward Lear, Gustave Flaubert, and, of course, Fyodor Dostoevsky, who were diagnosed with TLE by medical experts. I suspect that the book would be important reading for anyone afflicted with epilepsy. Some of the ideas in it, for example, that epilepsy can affect personality, creativity, even religious feeling, are controversial, no doubt, and may be troubling to some. Ultimately though, the book is an entertaining, and at times brilliant, description of the mind-body problem.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Powerful, Insightful. Explores the Origin of TLE, June 12, 2005

By 

gcw (Longmont, Colorado) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Seized (Hardcover)

If you are looking to explore the origins and sometimes bizarre characteristics of temporal lobe epilepsy, this is the book for you. Eve LaPlante takes the reader through territory seldom delt with in other publications about temporal lobe epilepsy.

A historical perspective gives a somewhat detailed glimpse into the lives of notible figures such as Van Gogh, Dostoevsky, Tennyson, Lewis Carroll and other famous people thought to have suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy.

Symptoms of temporal lobe epilepsy are discussed in detail with particular attention to hyperreligiosity and spiritual beliefs. In particular, out of body experiences and deja vu, which are common experiences in TLE, are given great attention and reinforce what sufferers already know to be true - these are episodes that occur with powerful and long-lasting consequences, both socially and morally. Hypergraphia, the tendency to produce a large amount of written or visually drawn material is covered in depth and is both entertaining and probing in it's analysis.

Clinically, the sufferer of TLE is often diagnosed as having a variety of psychiatric illnesses, including schizophrenia, mood disorder and bipolar disorder due to the wide variety of symptoms as well as the often bizarre presentations. Contemporary patients are profiled as a complement to help the reader visualize some of the aspects of TLE's effect on the personality of it's sufferer.

There are some passages in the book that are a little repetitive, but in general, I found this to be an indespensible resource for anyone interested in learning more about TLE.