Thalamic Lesions for the Control of Epilepsy

Abstract
A CLASSIFICATION of epilepsy into cortical and subcortical types together with the knowledge that cortical brain lesions are sometimes followed by focal cortical seizures leads, not unnaturally, to the supposition that subcortical lesions are followed by subcortical epilepsy. On the contrary, it is now clear that the large numbers of subcortical lesions made in alleviating some of the symptoms of the dyskinesias have not been followed by a wave of subcortical epilepsy. Nor is there an increased incidence of epilepsy in the untreated dyskinesias (except perhaps in athetosis), although these are conditions in which undoubted subcortical pathology exists. In fact, we have never encountered epilepsy in a patient with Paralysis Agitans. We have observed it in association with athetosis and, in 1960, we treated one such patient (case 1) who had right athetosis, right hemiparesis, temporal lobe epilepsy, and a strong epileptic focus in the left temporal lobe. She was