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Welcome to Celebrate Creativity -  Episode 447 - What the Dickens!

Today I want to look at Charles Dickens - and no I could not find any reliable information that said Charles Dickens suffered from epilepsy, but his connection to epilepsy and neurology is extremely notable because of his descriptions of some of his characters having epileptic episodes.

Again, there is no record of Charles Dickens have any form of epilepsy - at least none that I could find - and I really looked - but he was an excellent writer, and described characters of his works who suffered from seizure disorders objectively and in great detail - in fact many medical schools today use his descriptions in neurology classes.

Dickens an extremely keen eye for human behavior. While though there’s no evidence he personally experienced epilepsy, he was fascinated by the extremes of human emotion and physical reaction. He grew up in a time when epilepsy was stigmatized and often poorly understood, which may have made his detailed depictions both sensational and socially informative.

Dickens was part of the Victorian realist tradition, which emphasized detailed, psychologically rich portrayals of characters. When writing someone experiencing a seizure—like the character of Squeers’ son or other minor characters—he wasn’t just showing a medical condition; he was conveying inner terror, vulnerability, or moral weakness. His meticulous depictions helped readers visualize and emotionally connect with characters.

Dickens read widely, including medical journals of his time such as  John Russell Reynolds’ Aids to the Diagnosis of Diseases of the Nervous System or other Victorian neurology texts that    described seizures clinically. Dickens likely drew on these descriptions to give his fiction both realism and credibility.

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