Earlier this month we highlighted ‘Making Modern Migraine Medieval: Men of Science, Hildegard of Bingen and the Life of a Retrospective Diagnosis’, an open access article from the most recent issue of Medical History. The author, Dr Katherine Foxhall (University of Leicester), has kindly provided some additional background information to this article which we include below. If this whets your appetite, the full article is available via the link! “The twelfth-century abbess Hildegard of Bingen is often described as a migraine sufferer. In addition to looking at how this diagnosis came about through the medical discussions of the late nineteenth century (which is itself a fascinating moment in the history of modern understandings of migraine), I explore how Hildegard’s migraine has been used in different ways to help authenticate particular arguments about illness in the past and present over the past century. In large part, the article is about retrospective diagnosis, but I wanted to use Hildegard as a way not just to dismiss it, as many others have done, but to examine how, why and under what circumstances these retro-diagnoses perform work when taken from the contexts of their creation and mobilised as ‘scientific evidence’. At the same time, however, I am very conscious of the meaning that migraine sufferers have gained from seeing their own experiences reflected in Hildegard of Bingen’s illuminated manuscripts and this article is part of a bigger project that I am working on that seeks to write a history of migraine that reflects and takes seriously the perspectives and words of people who have suffered, and continue to suffer, from this very debilitating common disorder.” dx.doi.org/10.1017/mdh.2014.28
Posted on: Mon, 21 Jul 2014 08:32:29 +0000
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