Katherine Foxhall. Migraine: A History

Abstract

This is an exemplary book, majestic in its scope, forensic in its attention to detail, and judicious in its balancing of the shifting boundaries of medical knowledge and the recovery of the experiences of migraine that medical knowledge has neglected. To track the history of a disorder over more than a thousand years, set against a working knowledge of contemporary pharmaceutical innovations and medical politics, would give all but a few scholars a serious headache. Foxhall pulls it off with aplomb, revealing not only a long and complex conceptual history of migraine, from hemicrania to megrim to sick headache to migraine, but also a clear appreciation of the situatedness of the experience of these disorders and the power structures that validate or invalidate accounts of suffering. Interwoven in all of this is a history of therapeutic treatments for migraine, from a tenth-century “leechbook” to a seventeenth-century manuscript household recipe book; from astrology to water treatments; from patent pills and nostrums to dietary regimens; from trepanation to vasoconstriction; from crushed worms to caffeine to art therapy. It is an astonishing parade of medical knowledge and, crucially, an appraisal of the practical value of this medical knowledge.