[The presentation of disease and medicine in film. Film stereotypes of epilepsy].

Our presentation examines historical changes in the contextualisation of epilepsy by the media. In movies, one may note a particularly long-lasting predominance of traditional complexes of the significance of epilepsy. Epilepsy as an hereditary disease, as a degenerative illness, as a cause of criminality. These are the motifs, established myths, which lived on in movies long beyond the time at which scientific opinion had distanced itself from them. A radical change in the manner of presentation of epilepsy began in the late sixties. From that time on, not only the connotation of epilepsy was altered, but, above all, the presentation of the patient, who henceforth, according to the changing processes of society was shown as a self-aware and active shaper of his life. Thus it is precisely the development during the last fifteen years, in which numerous sensitive motion pictures have tackled the inner perspective of the patient, movies having not only ceased to pass on the established myths, but become promoters of new attitudes toward disease. With this type of representation of disease and patient, due to its direct and broad effect, motion pictures can spread new realities in a manner hardly possible for other media.