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 […]

Cheyne did not, however, see weak nerves as entirely unhealthy. The thinner and more fragile the nerve, the more quickly it could transmit a quality called “sense.” “Sensibility” conveyed aesthetic, intellectual, and social refinement, made one a “quick Thinker,” and provided the “most lively imagination.” Talented people were born with “organs finer, quicker, more agile, […]

In Western medicine, headache disorders have long been understood as complaints that are rooted in the body but that maintain intimate relationships with emotions. Even as far back as Plato’s Charmides, Socrates refuses to give the hero headache medicine till first he had eased his troubled mind; body and soul, he said, must be cured […]

the credibility and the legitimacy of a disorder—and how much we, as a society, choose to invest in its treatment—is intimately tied to how we perceive the moral character of the patient. Joanna Kempner in Not Tonight