ABSTRACT
According to biographer Curtis Cate, Friedrich Nietzsche’s migraines became particularly troublesome in his thirteenth year, making him “permanently unwell” (13, 184). He spent much time in his boarding school’s “sickroom,” and attacks seem to have been prompted by weather, schoolwork, exams, and his intensive independent intellectual exercise. In fact, one of his doctors recommended, “Be more stupid and you will feel better” (Cate 184). Against this advice, unfortunately for his health but fortunately for us, Nietzsche obsessively studied and produced in spite of his pain, which clearly affected his worldview. At age 16, Nietzsche could have been just as easily speaking of migraine as of fate, in fact as a migraineur he seems to have intertwined the two, 1 when he said,
What is it that pulls the soul of so many men of power down to the commonplace, thereby hindering a higher fl ight of ideas? A fatalistic structure of skull and spine; the condition and nature of their parents. . . . We have been infl uenced. And we lack the strength to react against this infl uence or even to recognize that we have been infl uenced. It is a painful feeling to have given up one’s independence through an unconscious acceptance of external impressions, stifl ing the capacity of the soul . . . and enduring the planting of the seeds of abberations [ sic ] within the soul and against the will.
