Migraine Trilogy Part 2: Migraines Through the Ages: What History’s Most Famous Sufferers Teach Us About Living Well Today

In 1885, Lewis Carroll made a diary entry that stopped him cold. He had just experienced, as he put it, “that odd optical affection of seeing moving fortifications, followed by a headache” [1]. He was describing what we now recognize as a classic migraine aura, the visual disturbances that precede an attack.

Carroll, of course, had no idea that the shimmering, shape-shifting world he was seeing would one day carry his name. Today, neurologists use the term “Alice in Wonderland Syndrome” to describe the perceptual distortions that can accompany migraine aura [2]. The rabbit hole, it turns out, was neurological.

Carroll is far from alone. Across centuries and continents, some of history’s most brilliant, prolific, and consequential figures lived with migraines, not in spite of their greatness, but alongside it. Their stories don’t just offer comfort to today’s sufferers. They offer something more useful: a window into how people have coped, created, and persevered through this condition long before there was a name for it.

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