Epilepsy is not only a medical problem, it is also a social and even a zoological one; and it appeals emphatically to preventive medicine, as all incurable diseases do, or should do. These points of view are included under the term Ecology, a science that deals with groups, and with the relation of these groups to the environment. It calls for a broader view than do the ordinary studies of the nature and cause of the disease.
For epilepsy has apparently a definite injurious influence on social life and economics as well as on the individuals who suffer from the disease. My aim has been to study the disease in bulk; with reference to the social effect of massed epilepsy on society, and of the units of the mass upon each other. Another line of attack is that of inquiry into the racial, geographical and social, and even evolutional conditions