David B. recounts how his older brother Jean-Christophe's severe, worsening epilepsy became the organizing fact of the entire family's existence, driving a years-long search through surgery, macrobiotic diets, spiritualists, acupuncture, and occult communes for a cure that never came. The illness did not just afflict the patient; it colonized the parents' decisions, the siblings' childhoods, and the household's emotional weather.
When conventional medicine offers no cure, a family will cycle through incompatible belief systems (diet, mysticism, alternative healers) not out of conviction but because each new system restores the hope that the illness is defeatable. The sequence of remedies tracks the intensity of hope, not any evidence that they work.
The author externalizes epilepsy as a recurring dragon or armored beast that he draws obsessively, turning an invisible, uncontrollable neurological event into a visible enemy he can depict and therefore partly master. Imagery becomes a tool for metabolizing a terror that has no shape of its own.
Viewing the family through the healthy child's eyes reveals how a sick sibling's needs absorb the parents' attention so completely that the well child's development, fears, and identity form in the shadow of someone else's crisis. The healthy one becomes both neglected and burdened with a vigilance no child should carry.