A tribute to Martinus Rulandus. A 16th-century description of benign focal epilepsy of childhood
A. C. van Huffelen
Department of Clinical Neurophysiology, University Hospital, Utrecht, the Netherlands.
There is a tendency to call benign focal epilepsy of childhood with
centrotemporal origin rolandic epilepsy for the sake of brevity. Martinus
Rulandus, a 16th-century medical author, deserves this homage far more than
Rolando. Attention is drawn to this 1597 description of the disease, which
has become the subject of many publications since 1952. Many
characteristics of the disease were already noticed about four centuries
ago.
