ABSTRACT

Whereas pain has been selectively ignored in children, migraine has been culturally dismissed to varying degrees in persons of all ages. N. Ann Davis argues that persons living with invisible impairments are socially required to prove their special needs through confessional narratives. Joanna Kempner shows that though migraine has been known and treated for at least 6,000 years, it is still a socially “contested illness” with a “legitimacy defi cit” (12, 9). Part of the problem, as Susannah B. Mintz explains, is that “headache is both one of the most common forms of chronic pain and one of the most clichéd” (2014, 84-85). Early terms such as “megrim” or “the megrims” were commonly synonymous with “low spirits” or even a “whim” or “fancy” ( Oxford English Dictionary ). As a socially dismissed and medically liminal experience, migraine requires extensive narratives to convince others of its existence. Yet, authentic versions of these narratives rarely make it beyond blogs and the self-help sections of bookstores. Migraineurs are almost as hard to fi nd, identifi ed precisely, in literary and popular culture as child migraineurs are in major migraine studies. Sure, they exist, but at a tiny fraction of the frequencies with which they exist in the everyday lives of real individuals. Where represented, however, literary migraine carries an ongoing record of treatments and revealing prejudices. Joanna Kempner writes that “disease categories refl ect the specifi c historical and social contexts in which they are created. Disease entities are as social as they are biological” (10). My analysis will provide historical contextualization of both the social and biological beliefs that have shaped literary migraine, with an eye to explaining why children are once again underrepresented and too easily overlooked.