The Hippocratic physicians insisted that epilepsy was a physical disease rather than a metaphysical mutation. This way of thinking about the disorder circulated beyond Cos and into a new millennium: Galen developed his theories about the disorder from similar principles. Nevertheless, fear that epilepsy signified spiritual contagion from possession was to play a part in discriminatory and stigmatising processes in biblical narratives. That fear reappeared in the political propaganda circulated in early seventeenth-century debates about witchcraft, religious faith and knowledge boundaries. By the eighteenth century, the notion that epilepsy was contagious had been more or less refuted, only to be replaced by a widely held conviction that exposure to the convulsing body could excite disorder in the sensitive and vulnerable bystander and the sight of a grand mal seizure was enough to contaminate the foetus of a pregnant woman.

To a significant extent, and despite some progress in modernising medical models of epilepsy, this stream of beliefs continued to hold some sway over medical thinking through the latter decades of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.