Although the Ancient Greeks referred to epilepsy as the "sacred disease", this perception of epilepsy as a "spiritual" disease was challenged by Hippocrates in his work On the Sacred Disease, who proposed that the source of epilepsy was from natural causes rather than supernatural ones. Early surgical treatment of epilepsy was primitive in Ancient Greek, Roman and Egyptian medicine. The 19th century saw the rise of targeted surgery for the treatment of epileptic seizures, beginning in 1886 with localized resections performed by Sir Victor Horsley, a neurosurgeon in London. Another advancement was that of the development by the Montreal procedure by Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield, which involved use of electrical stimulation among conscious patients to more accurately identify and resect the epileptic areas in the brain. Society and culture Economics Seizures result in direct economic costs of about one billion dollars in the United States. Epilepsy results in economic costs in Europe of around €15.5 billion in 2004. In India, epilepsy is estimated to result in costs of US$1.7 billion or 0.5% of the GDP. They make up about 1% of emergency department visits (2% for emergency departments for children) in the United States. Driving Many areas of the world require a minimum of six months from the last seizure before people can drive a vehicle. Research Scientific work into the prediction of epileptic seizures began in the 1970s. Several techniques and methods have been proposed, but evidence regarding their usefulness is still lacking. Two promising areas include gene therapy, and seizure detection and seizure prediction. Gene therapy for epilepsy consists of employing vectors to deliver pieces of genetic material to areas of the brain involved in seizure onset. Seizure prediction is a special case of seizure detection in which the developed systems is able to issue a warning before the clinical onset of the epileptic seizure. Computational neuroscience has been able to bring a new point of view on the seizures by considering the dynamical aspects. References External links Symptoms and signs Wikipedia medicine articles ready to translate