An encounter between medicine and astronomy: migraine visions
Résumé
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.