On Migraine and the Eyes

I recently wrote a post for the Recipes Project, a wonderful collaborative blog about magic, art, food, medicine and history. I was tracing the origins of a ‘megreeme’ remedy (dated 1606) across printed and manuscript recipe collections – a trail that led through four centuries. Searching the digitised collections of the Wellcome Library’s early modern recipe collections has been one of the joys of this migraine research project – the wealth of medical, culinary and veterinary knowledge within them is astounding. There are also more than thirty remedies for migraine within these  manuscripts. From basic plasters to be laid over the head, to complex drinks that required effort and financial outlay to create but would then keep for many years, there is a real sense that many of the compilers of these precious volumes of domestic medical knowledge encountered migraine routinely, and took it seriously. So when I received a tweet asking whether visual migraines were ever mentioned, I was happy for an excuse to return to the collections again.