THE HIBBERT ASSEMBLY

1. Draw a picture of someone wearing a medic-alert bracelet.

2. Imagine that a friend with whom you stay for holidays has started to have epileptic seizures. You want to tell your friend that you will still have good times together.
Write a letter to her, or him.
Or imagine that you have epilepsy and you are going to stay with a friend. Write a letter about how you want to be treated whilst you are there

3. Read the story of Jesus healing the boy who had epilepsy. Mark 9 verses 14-29 Sometimes when the boy had a seizure he was in danger.
How might he have been harmed?
(In Jesus's day people did not really understand epilepsy. They thought that we could be taken over by evil spirits and that these caused the seizures. We have more knowledge of medical conditions now. We know that seizures are a sign that there is a flaw in the working of the brain, perhaps because of scarred tissue.)

4. Paul had a medical condition which may have been epilepsy. Read what he says of this . 2 Corinthians 12, verses 7-10

5. July is named after Julius Caesar, one of many famous people who have had epilepsy.
Do you know the names of all the months of the year? Say them over.
The months got their names in Roman times. But do you know whom they were named after or what their names mean?
Look at our page about months.

6. Make sure that you know what to do if someone has a seizure

7. Simon, one of the boys in William Golding's Lord of the Flies, has epilepsy. Read Golding's account of his having a seizure, at the end of chapter eight.

8. Dickens portrays a servant who has epilepsy in Bleak House. She is always called Guster, though, Dickens tells us, she may have been christened Augusta. Read Dicken's description of her in Chapter 10.
Does anything surprise you in this account?
Would a modern-day writer speak about someone with epilepsy in this way?