On the Sacred Disease is a work of the Hippocratic Corpus, written about 400 B.C. Its authorship cannot be confirmed, so is regarded as dubious. The treatise is thought to contain one of the first recorded observations of epilepsy in humans. The author explains these phenomena by the flux of the phlegm flowing from the brain into the veins rather than assigning them a divine origin. This turn from a supernatural to a naturalistic explanation is considered a major breakthrough in the history of medicine. Summary The author, putatively Hippocrates, comments on the "sacred" disease, declaring that it is no more sacred than other diseases. He stresses the importance of the disease having no relation with the divine whatsoever, but instead being purely of human origin. The author of On the Sacred Disease argues that even the most mysterious of diseases was still of natural cause and not of divine origin: Men regard its nature and cause as divine from ignorance and wonder because it is not at all like to other diseases…Men being in want of the means of life, invent many and various...