In a much talked about biography of Emily Dickinson, Lives Like Loaded Guns, Lyndall Gordon poses the question, “Did Emily Dickinson have epilepsy?”
According to Gordon, a senior research fellow at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford, Dickinson is both ambivalent and truthful about what she calls her sickness. Gordon says, “Her handicap or whatever we want to call it was connected with her visionary life.”
Dickinson says in one of her poems,
‘My lost by sickness — Was it Loss? / Or that Etherial Gain — / One earns by measuring the Grave / Then — measuring the Sun —’
Listen to the interview with Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air
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Up Next: Where are all those epilepsy research dollars going?
Jessica Keenan Smith is a patient advocate and epilepsy community leader with more than 15 years of experience. As Founder and CEO of Living Well With Epilepsy and Executive Director of ASENT she bridges the gap between the scientific and patient communities, with a particular focus on the needs of the epilepsies. Jessica Keenan Smith is Founder and CEO of Living Well With Epilepsy, an award winning online resource for people affected by epilepsy to share stories and access in-depth information on the disease. Since 2009, Living Well With Epilepsy (https://livingwellwithepilepsy.com) has been featured in Forbes, Wired, NBC, NPR and the cover story of Epilepsy Advocate Magazine and has partnered with companies such as UCB, Lundbeck, Sunovion, Eisai, and more. Ms. Smith is also the Executive Director of the American Society for Experimental Neurotherapeutics (ASENT) (https://asent.org), an organization that brings together leaders from industry, academia, government and advocacy who are engaged in bringing drugs and devices to market across all neurologic disease states. In this role she is responsible for leading a successful scientific journal and annual scientific conference with speakers from all over the world.
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