Over 100 years ago, on the 27th of January 1881, Fyodor Mikhailovitch Dostoevsky died. Since that time, many biographies, monographs, memoirs, and, to a lesser extent, articles in the medical literature have discussed the fact that Dostoevsky was a patient with epilepsy. An attempt is made here to integrate the details of his illness into a medical case history, as we now do for every patient who visits a physician for the first time. The information pertinent to the case history includes: a description of all seizures, frequency of seizures, provocative factors, course of the disease, treatment, and family history. Even though we do not have the benefits of the results of electroencephalography (invented by Hans Berger in 1929), classification of the type of epilepsy Dostoevsky had is attempted. The existence or absence of the so-called ecstatic aura is crucial to such classification. Based on the data, it is likely that Dostoevsky suffered from partial complex epilepsy with secondarily generalized nocturnal seizures rather than primary generalized epilepsy.

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (1821-1881) suffered from epilepsy. Some type of psychopathology can be found in about 25% of the characters of his novels. Some of them have seizures. In at least five of them Dostoevsky clearly intends them to have epilepsy. Others are more likely to be created as people with hysteria or sometimes, for instance, possession. In this essay an inventory is given by more or less comprehensive quotes of different types of seizures in five novels. The seizures are named in the novels with a varying vocabulary based on the concepts of nosology in the 19th century, the knowledge of Dostoevsky of these concepts, his own experiences, and problems in translation and transliteration. In the discussion, analysis of the role these factors played in the understanding of what Dostoevsky really expressed is given attention. Special attention is given to the so-called ecstatic aura. This element of focal epileptic seizures is so rare that in the past the description of it raised doubts on its existence as such and therefore the embellishment by Dostoevsky, describing his own experience and/or that of his epileptic characters Kirillov and Myshkin. The consequence of this analytic approach, however, should not be losing one's amazement of the genius polyphonic creativity of Dostoevsky to integrate so many profound aspects of the human and especially the Russian soul in the characters of his novels.

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The literary quality of Vincent van Gogh's correspondence is widely recognized. He wrote expressively and evocatively, and had great literary knowledge. In this essay we follow his medical history in many quotes from in his letters to see how Vincent expressed his complaints, knowledge, and emotions connected with his disease. The symptoms became most clear after December 1888. In the beginning, Van Gogh hesitated to tell much about his ailment, but gradually painted in the letters his experiences, making use of the intermittent course of his cycloid psychoses. We will see an indication that, in the network that mediated Van Gogh's brain (dys)function, elements of synesthesia, prosopagnosia, and spatial agnosia might have been activated. Van Gogh's affinity for poetry, already in his early twenty's, makes the hypothesis of a, by epileptic discharges, kindled temporal lobe at most only part of the complex interpretation of this creative and suffering mind.

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