Historical aspects of migraine.
نویسنده
چکیده
The student of medicine first encountering the migraine literature will immediately perceive the extraordinary amount written, and will sense an unspoken frustrated fascination-a sort of blighted curiosity which pervades many accounts and descriptions. Enlightened self interest may explain some of the attention shown by physicians, since the incidence in our profession is as high as 30%. It is almost impossible to do justice to such a vast literature spanning over 2,000 years, much of which is no longer of easy access and is often reproduced by copies of other authors' quotations. This account is guilty in part of this criticism. In it I select some of the excellent descriptive writing of the early physicians, and by taking samples of their scholarship try to outline their thoughts about the nature of the disorder and its symptoms which are in no small measure responsible for our current insecure concepts. The Shorter Oxford Dictionary (SOED) cites under MEGRIM, late Mediaeval English: l.b. = vertigo 1595. 2. A whim, fancy, fad 1593. 3. pi. 'Vapours'; low spirits 1633. 4. pl. The staggers 1639. "Hee is troubled with a perpetual migrim; at sea hee wisheth to bee on land, and on land at sea 1631" The first appearance of "hemicrania" (Greek, halfskull) is cited by the SOED as 1597; this refers to English texts. Thus even before The Plague and the Great Fire, it was used to describe a far wider constellation of symptoms than headache alone; the associations with disturbed balance and sea-sickness, the emotional changes and depression implied by "the vapours" and "low spirits" were evidently well understood. Was it a coincidence that the same word Megrim was also applied in 1836 to Arnoglossus laterna, the scald-fish, or was this some oblique reference to burning headache or perhaps to facial flushing later coined under the name "red migraine"?
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ورودعنوان ژورنال:
- Journal of neurology, neurosurgery, and psychiatry
دوره 49 10 شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 1986