Archive for July, 2016
Men are sick, women are hysterical
…Wolff’s discussions of women and migraine were intriguingly limited, especially given that by then most physicians had agreed that women experienced migraines more often than men. Much like his Victorian predecessors, Wolff preferred to talk about headache disorders in the masculine. Likewise, his descriptions of migraine emphasized masculine anxieties about the rigors of work life. […]
I don’t want to try to get better anymore
My roommate was reading The Parasite Underground and quoted me the bit about trying different drugs, doses, timing: If you have a terrible reaction to hookworm — which isn’t uncommon — you might start over with smaller doses, and gradually introduce larvae over a longer period of time. Different organisms might also work for different […]
Control the body
If, as Foucault argued, modernity was the act of disciplining bodies, then Wolff’s migraine personality was discipline in its extreme—a pathological reaction to the corporeal demands of power. His subjects’ neatness and fastidiousness, he wrote, was exceeded only by their efficiency. People with migraine loved order and repetition, feared failure, and resented interruptions. They created […]
Mother With Migraine Helped By Family by Science Source
Mother With Migraine Helped By Family by Science Source Hide the light and shush! My mom suffered intensely from migraine when I was a child. I wish I’d been more considerate 🙁
Mental states influencing physical states wasn’t always interpreted as malingering
Wolff’s migraine personality was also informed by a burgeoning psychodynamic literature that viewed bodies as “systems of psychobiological adaptations.” Using this framework, migraine could be understood to be a protective device that provided a way for the body to withdraw from stressful situations. In fact, migraine was thought to be an especially useful adaptation for […]
Patterns
Patterns The visions produced by mescal and other hallucinogens would usually progress from these elementary forms of hallucination to elaborate visions of a much more personal and sometimes mystical sort (including scenes of people, animals, and landscapes). But Klüver remarked that the lower-level, geometric hallucinations that preceded these were identical to those found in a […]
Clavus hystericus
Clavus hystericus, sometimes called “hysterical headache,” is the clearest example of a gendered diagnostic category in this time period. In his Treatises on the Diseases of the Nervous System, James Ross describes hysterical headache as a variation of hysteria: “Hysterical Headache is met with in females, and is generally accompanied by other symptoms of hysteria. […]