For centuries, people have talked of a powerful bodily disorder called migraine, which currently affects about a billion people around the world. Yet until now, the rich history of this condition has barely been told. In Migraine, award-winning historian Katherine Foxhall reveals the ideas and methods that ordinary people and medical professionals have used to describe, explain, and treat migraine since the Middle Ages. Touching on classical theories of humoral disturbance and medieval bloodletting, Foxhall also describes early modern herbal remedies, the emergence of neurology, and evolving practices of therapeutic experimentation. Throughout the book, Foxhall persuasively argues that our current knowledge of migraine's neurobiology is founded on a centuries-long social, cultural, and medical history. This history, she demonstrates, continues to profoundly shape our knowledge of this complicated disease, our attitudes toward people who have migraine, and the sometimes drastic measures that we take to address pain. Migraine is an intimate look at how cultural attitudes and therapeutic practices have changed radically in response to medical and pharmaceutical developments. Foxhall draws on a wealth of previously unexamined sources, including medieval manuscripts, early-modern recipe books, professional medical journals, hospital case notes, newspaper advertisements, private diaries, consultation letters, artworks, poetry, and YouTube videos. Deeply researched and beautifully written, this fascinating and accessible study of one of our most common, disabling—and yet often dismissed—disorders will appeal to physicians, historians, scholars in medical humanities, and people living with migraine alike.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Note on Terminology and Names
• Chapter One. Introduction: Programmed In?
  • Nature’s Rotten Tricks, 1985
• Chapter Two. The “Beating of Hammers”: Classical and Medieval Approaches to Hemicrania
  • Bald’s Leechbook, c. 950
• Chapter Three. “Take Housleeke, and Garden Wormes”: Migraine Medicine in the Early Modern Household
  • Mrs. Corlyon’s Booke, 1606
• Chapter Four. A “Deadly Tormenting Megrym”: Expanding Markets and Changing Meanings
  • Francis Thomson’s Letter, c. 1590
• Chapter Five. “The Pain Was Very Much Relieved and She Slept”: Gender and Patienthood in the Nineteenth Century
  • Elizabeth, the Girl Who Dropped Trays, 1895
• Chapter Six. “As Sharp as If Drawn with Compasses”: Victorian Vision, Men of Science, and the Making of Modern Migraine
  • Mr. Beck’s Aura, 1895
• Chapter Seven. “A Shower of Phosphenes”: Twentieth-Century Stories and the Medical Uses of History
  • Discovering Hildegard of Bingen, 1913
• Chapter Eight. “Happy Hunting Ground”: Conceptual Fragmentation and Experimentation in the Twentieth Century
  • The Nurse with a Hole in Her Skull, 1936
• Chapter Nine. “If I Could Harness Pain”: The Migraine Art Competitions, 1980–1987
  • A Woman in the Kitchen, 1981
• Chapter Ten. Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography

This book was brought to publication with the generous assistance of the Wellcome Trust.

All rights reserved. Published 2019

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Foxhall, Katherine, author.

Title: Migraine : a history / Katherine Foxhall.

Description: Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018039557 | ISBN 9781421429489 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 1421429489 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781421429496 (electronic) | ISBN 1421429497 (electronic) | ISBN 9781421429502 (electronic open access) | ISBN 1421429500 (electronic open access)

Subjects: | MESH: Migraine Disorders—history

Classification: LCC RC392 | NLM WL 11.1 | DDC 616.8/4912—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018039557

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

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