The Collaborative International Dictionary
Petit mal \Pe*tit" mal"\ [F., lit., little sickness.] (Med.) The mildest form of epilepsy, with momentary faintness or unconsciousness, but without convulsions; -- opposed to grand mal.
Wiktionary
n. (context medicine English) A form of epilepsy where the seizures are characterized as minor, the person becomes vacant or unaware, but not involving spasms and unconsciousness. These seizures are usually brief, lasting up to 30 seconds, and may include twitching. A formal medical term would be absence seizures.
WordNet
n. a seizure (or a type of epilepsy characterized by such seizures) of short duration characterized by momentary unconsciousness and local muscle spasms or twitching [syn: epilepsia minor]
Usage examples of "petit mal".
It was as if he'd suddenly been overcome by an earlobe-tugging heel-thumping chin-ducking shoulder-shrugging behind-scratching petit mal seizure.
From my own observation, and from the symptoms reported by My Lord Marquis, I would have put it down as a mild form of epilepsy -- what we call the petit mal type, the 'little sickness'.
He had an especially vivid dream life, perhaps, but the fact that his eyelids rolled back did not imply that he was suffering from epilepsy, petit mal, or any other nervous disorder.
But gradually the extravagant grand mal jerks of his body moderate to petit mal, and then to little more than twitches.
At the same instant that Jack Sawyer had jammed the burning coin into the forehead of a monstrosity in the Territories, Reuel Gardener, who had been afflicted with relatively harmless petit mal epileptic seizures ever since the age of six (the same age at which Osmond's son had begun to show signs of what was called Blasted Lands Sickness), apparently suffered a grand mal seizure in the back of a Wolf-driven Cadillac on I-70, westbound to California from Illinois.