Imagine your head is splitting. The pain is blinding, relentless, unbearable. Now
imagine that the best medical minds of the day lean in, consider your symptoms
carefully, and hand you a clay crocodile to tie to your head.

Welcome to ancient Egypt’s approach to migraine treatment. 

The history of how humanity has tried to treat migraines is by turns bizarre,
heartbreaking, and — if you squint at it just right — quietly inspiring. Because woven
through thousands of years of crocodile figurines, skull drilling, opium wine, and
electric fish, there is a persistent thread: people have always refused to give up on
finding relief. And today, after all those centuries of trial and error, we finally have
treatments that actually work. The story of how

Most people don’t get their first migraine until their teens or twenties. I got mine before
I could tie my shoes.

I was two years old the first time a migraine knocked me flat. Of course, nobody called it
that yet. I was a toddler — crying, inconsolable, sensitive to every light in the room. It
took until I was five years old before a doctor finally put a name to what was happening
in my head. Five years old. And even then, the diagnosis felt less like an answer and
more like the beginning of a very long set of questions. When I was sixteen, a
neurologist told me I could get a migraine with no warning, and in the same amount of
time it takes me to blush.

More than four decades later, I’m still learning. But I’ve also learned a lot — about

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