Intellectual Brilliance in Spite of, Not Because of Epilepsy

Seizure disorders of whatever kind never enhance a victim’s mental abilities. No one has ever accomplished anything worthwhile during a seizure or as the direct result of a seizure. If a person with seizures is successful in life, it is not because he has epilepsy, but in spite of it. Many successful people are reported to have had seizure disorders, among them Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Buddha, Mohammed, Napoleon, van Gogh, Pascal, Socrates, Dante, Tchaikovsky, Lord Byron, Alfred Nobel, and Dostoevsky; but this disorder was not responsible for their success. So, even if Ellen White suffered from partial complex seizures, which we do not concede, any success she may have achieved was not because she had partial complex seizures, but in spite of them.ViOSe 16.4

Some have claimed that the great Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky profited from having seizures. If he did, it was only because he was able to portray some of the characters in his novels as having seizures, and not because of anything he was able to accomplish as a direct result of his epileptic seizures.ViOSe 17.1