Take the hair of a virgin kid [a young goat],
Let a wise woman spin [it] on the right side ...
And bind the head of the sick man ...
That the Headache may ascend to heaven
Like the smoke of a peaceful homestead.
- Ancient Babylonian verse-remedy for migraine headaches
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This column is being scribbled during Migraine Awareness Week. Made aware, the authoritative Canberra Times and ABC radio news are reporting that millions of Australians (one in seven of us is a 'migraineur') are gnawed by the beast of migraine in one or more of its many, many, mysterious manifestations.
For almost all of my life I have been blessed with robust good health so that disabling ill health, whenever it comes (as migraines have now begun coming to me in my old age), always has a kind of intriguing novelty about it. (And please forgive me for my overuse of the word 'migraineur' but it is excitingly new to wordmongering me and I can't leave it alone.)
And this was the spirit in which Virginia Woolf (a migraineur, like your columnist, and like Elvis Presley, Napoleon Bonaparte, Sigmund Freud, Vincent van Gogh, Hugh Jackman and a zillion others) wrote her healthily witty and wise essay On Being Ill.
It is a brilliant piece. I commend it to everyone who is ever languishingly unwell, including the perhaps one in seven of this column's teeming millions of readers who are tormented by migraines.
"Considering how common illness is," Woolf reflects. "how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view.
"When we think of this, as illness frequently forces us to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature. Novels, one would have thought, would have been devoted to influenza; epic poems to typhoid; odes to pneumonia ... But no ... literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear..."
Migraines are much, much more than headaches but as a headache-prone migraineur Woolf knows what she was writing about when in her famous illness essay she sighs that "The English language, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache. Let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry."
And the migraineur who goes to doctors and who researches the malady (I am a girly swot and am reading everything and attending every webinar I can on the subject) quickly learns that migraines are still poorly understood by modern medicine.
Migraine is a brain matter and is as mysterious and complex as the brain. So it transpires that every migraineur has his or her own boutique symptoms and struggles. No two sufferers' "triggers" of episodes of the malady are the same. And the galaxy of suspected "triggers" includes everything from coffee, wine, chocolate, oranges, over-ripe bananas and being a woman (I am abstaining from all of these, in hope) to loud noises, piquant smells, bright sunlight and changes in the weather.
Anxiety too is suspected to be a common migraine trigger and this recent onset of my migraine experiences has coincided exactly with the alarming recent rise and rise of One Nation. But this may be only a coincidence and I have hesitated to even mention it to the already migraine-baffled doctors trying to treat me.
And yet one must not rule out the possible health consequences of politics. In her exciting new essay Medieval Mental Health in the online magazine Aeon, historian Katherine Harvey tells how in 1395, when the Italian politician and wool merchant Niccolaio Martini was ill with a high fever, he diagnosed that he had come down with this illness after getting "very upset" about the result of a recent election.
Professor Harvey's theme (although she shudders sceptically at the benighted medieval belief that eating ostrich livers would fend off bouts of melancholy) is the ways in which medieval insights into mental health triggers are uncannily like today's scientifically proven ones.
So for example, with the therapeutic powers of outdoor exercise now proven to us in our scientific times, she finds the 15th-century medical writer John Mirfield insisting that outdoor exercise is good for the body, the soul and the mind.
"For then a man is exposed," Mirfield enthuses, "to wholesome air, and he rejoices in gazing far and near, and upon the sky, the sea and the green landscape; and he is therefore constrained to commend, to praise, and to magnify the Lord his God".
Yes, and so 'tis no wonder that I find my migraine episodes (so far only upsetting nuisances compared with the life-changing hells that migraines inflict on millions) subdued by a brisk, spiritual, psychotherapeutic walk (wearing sturdy shoes and the goats' yarn wool bandage a wise woman, my wife, has spun for me) in the leafy sanatorium of Canberra's National Arboretum.
