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A little more than one century has elapsed since the appearance of the first drug for the management of epilepsy. Now available are a few dozen excellent anticonvulsants which insure significant seizure control in some 80% of all patients with recurring seizures. Somewhere, or sometime, a study would have to appear delineating the prognosis of patients with seizures before the advent of the ideal anticonvulsant makes data irrelevant. This challenge was met and accepted by Dr. Ernest A. Rodin, a meticulous, methodical, and even pessimistic person who, with realism and with long and valuable experience, "concentrates," as he calls it, on current unsatisfactory results with available medications in this "hopeful disease."
Directing one of the largest areas of epilepsy in this country, the author has drawn from his own personal investigations and those of other authorities to create an unusual