Posts tagged “joanna kempner”

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

When your worldview and the world collide

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, […]

Join the convent!

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 […]

I’m a bad bitch

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