He worried that so many migrainous women sought diagnostic tests and spent so much money on doctors when doctors had so few effective migraine treatments. The more appropriate role for the physician, he argued, would be to spend time with the patient, “in talking over her life problems and in showing her how to live […]

…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. […]

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 […]

John Symonds’s 1848 lecture about the relationship between migraine and nervous temperament shared these gender and class assumptions. But he added a new dimension: “Such persons may also feel pains which have taken their origin from mere ideas.” And, thus, Symonds became the first—but certainly not the last—headache doctor to suggest in print that head […]