Below are opening passages from the Hippocratic text Sacred Disease in which the anonymous author uses the new scalpel of logic to refute religious and magical claims about the causes of epilepsy and the ways to treat it:

I do not believe that the so-called "sacred disease" is any more divine or sacred than any other disease but, on the contrary, has specific characteristics and a definite cause. Nevertheless, because it is completely different from other diseases, it has been regarded as a divine visitation by those who . . . view it with ignorance and astonishment. The claim of divine origin is kept alive by the difficulty of understanding the malady, but destroyed by the simplistic method of healing they adopt, consisting as it does of purifications and incantations.... In my opinion, those who first called this disease "sacred" were the sort...