Focal Epileptogenic Lesions of Birth and Infancy

There is a group of epileptic patients whose history points to a cerebral lesion at the time of birth or during some febrile illness of infancy. The nature of these lesions which produce late habitual epilepsy has received scant attention up to the present. On the other hand, traumatic and ischemic cerebral injury has been studied exhaustively in autopsy series and the relation of such injury to cerebral diplegia has been a subject of discussion for many years. REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE In 1862, William Little¹published a description of the diplegia or bilateral paralysis which he attributed almost wholly to asphyxia of the brain resulting from an accident of birth. He reported postmortem observations in only 2 cases. In one there had been gross intracranial bleeding; in the other, only congestion of the whole brain. In subsequent years there has been much discussion of the relation of spastic