ABSTRACT
The literature on epilepsy and crime before 1947 frequently attributed anti-social, sexual and violent crimes to the epileptic on extremely doubtful evidence. Physicians and criminologists writing under the influence of Lombroso almost seemed to regard ‘the epileptic con stitution’ and ‘the criminal constitution’ as almost interchangeable concepts. The methodology of such studies was, however, extremely poor.1Further papers reporting the association of crime and epilepsy have been critically reviewed above in the sections on ‘Temporal Lobe Epilepsy’ and ‘Epileptic Equivalents’ (pp. 53-70 and 71-7).
