A curiosity in the history of sciences: the words "megrim" and "migraine".

Vertigo has been described by medical doctors since Antiquity, but the condition is not limited to human medicine. It is also interesting to note that vertigo-related disorders were long only mentioned in the descriptions of migraine: however, in the Corpus Hippocraticum, a pain with vertigo (odunê kai skotodiniê) was not considered as hemicrania; in Aretaeus medical text, scotoma was clearly another disease than heterocraniê; although there could be metastases between them (pain could be followed by vertigo, as Boerhaave translated from Greek to Latin); Caelius Aurelianus, Ibn Zuhr of Seville, Isma'il Jurjani considered vertigo as a separate entity from "migraine" as well. One had to wait until 1831 for "ophthalmic migraine" (Piorry) to take systematically this disorder into account (to more or less causally relate it to migraine), and 1988 for the International Headache Society to acknowledge vertigo as a symptom of aura in "basilar migraine," which was given the better name of basilar-type migraine in 2004. From this point of view, veterinary medicine presents a particular interest because, for centuries, diseases mainly affecting horses - called in French "migraine," "mal de tête" (headache), "douleur de tête" (head pain), or in English "megrim(s)," "head-ach," "pain," and for which it is not self-evident that they are in any way related with the conditions that bear these names in humans - have been connected with vestibular impairments. Whatever is the relationship between the human and animal pathologies and, although it is impossible to interpret animal signs (abnormal behavior) with human symptoms (complaints), some impressive descriptions, written by Anglo-Saxon authors for the most part, seem to have played a significant role in the history of migraine. The purpose is to examine how a word in its English veterinary medical sense could have influenced French medical descriptions.

[An encounter between medicine and astronomy: migraine visions]. / Une rencontre entre médecine et astronomie: les visions migraineuses.

Until the second half of the eighteenth century, the very definition of migraine as hemicrania (pain felt in one side of the head) eclipsed symptoms that were then considered as "marginal", although tingling sensations, speech impairment and visual impairment had already been described by Piso and Wepfer. The possibility of a migraine without a headache nevertheless started to be envisaged, inviting one to re-evaluate the status of these phenomena. But, as paradoxical as it may seem, it is in the field of astronomy that some of these phenomena such as visual aberrations were analyzed systematically and acknowledged to be migrainous. Scintillating scotoma is no exception: it was indeed mentioned as early as in the Hippocratic corpus, but until the end of the nineteenth century it was addressed as a separate condition to migraine. We limit our study to the visual aura. Our purpose is to show that the ophthalmic symptoms affecting migraine sufferers were not, by themselves, a medical object--which somehow calls into question the very functioning of science.

An approach to nineteenth-century medical lexicon: the term "dreamy state".

Hughlings-Jackson coined the concept of dreamy state: According to him, one of the sensations of a "dreamy state" was an odd feeling of recognition and familiarity, often called "deja vu". A clear sense of strangeness could also be experienced in the "dreamy state" ("jamais vu"). Jackson himself did not use these French terms, but he was quite clear about the vivid feelings of strangeness and familiarity, which can occur in both normal and pathological conditions. In order to explore some of the exchanges between medical and nonmedical vocabularies, we examine the historical origins of this technical concept. By basing the study on European (medical and nonmedical) literature of the nineteenth century, we review the first descriptions of this state and compare them with the famous Hughlings-Jackson definitions. It appears that this medical concept was partly borrowed from a wide cultural background before being rationally developed and reworked in the fields of neurology and psychiatry.