Medicine: Convulsion by Television

At least 1,800 years before television caused its first headaches, bargain hunters in the slave markets of Rome submitted prospective purchases to a trial as nerve-racking as watching a badly adjusted picture tube. Before a slave was bought and paid for, he was forced to stare at a potter’s wheel rotating rapidly in bright sunlight. If the flicker caused the slave to keel over, the deal was off. Seizures before the spinning potter’s wheel were taken as a sign of “the falling sickness,” the Roman name for epilepsy.

Though the slave markets are long gone, flicker epilepsy has returned—a byproduct of modern electronics. The jittering of an out-of-kilter picture tube can cause severe epileptic seizures. In the past two years, two British doctors have seen 14 children with epileptic seizures induced by television flicker. The condition, they think, is more common than most physicians realize. Most striking is the fact that nine of the 14 patients had convulsions only while watching TV; only five of them were known to be susceptible because they had had similar attacks in other circumstances.