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 my triggers, my body,

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,

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 we got here is worth