Featured on PDR in the collection Visualizing Migraines: The Attempts of Hubert Airy and Others to Depict Scintillating Scotomata

“Migraine affects a substantial minority of the population, occurs in all civilisations, and has been recognized since the dawn of recorded history”, wrote neurologist Oliver Sacks in a 1970 study that arose in response to the common medical sentiment that “little is known about migraine and even less to be done about it”. While a migraine shares some symptoms with the common headache, frequently-experienced visual distortions set it apart from the effects of tension, stress, or dehydration. And yet, despite the prevalence of this phenomenon, its medical observation is relatively recent. As Katherine Foxhall chronicles in Migraine: A History, John Fothergill’s description of a headache he suffered in the winter of 1778 is thought to be the first anglophone account of a migraine’s ocular disturbances.…