A curiosity in the history of sciences: the words "megrim" and "migraine"

Abstract

Vertigo has been described by medical doctors since Antiquity, but the condition is not limited to human medicine. It is also interesting to note that vertigo-related disorders were long only mentioned in the descriptions of migraine: however, in the Corpus Hippocraticum, a pain with vertigo (odunê kai skotodiniê) was not considered as hemicrania; in Aretaeus medical text, scotoma was clearly another disease than heterocraniê; although there could be metastases between them (pain could be followed by vertigo, as Boerhaave translated from Greek to Latin); Caelius Aurelianus, Ibn Zuhr of Seville, Īsmā'īl Jurjānī considered vertigo as a separate entity from "migraine" as well. One had to wait until 1831 for "ophthalmic migraine" (Piorry) to take systematically this disorder into account (to more or less causally relate it to migraine), and 1988 for the International Headache Society to acknowledge vertigo as a symptom of aura in "basilar migraine," which was given the better name of basilar-type migraine in 2004. From this point of view, veterinary medicine presents a particular interest because, for centuries, diseases mainly affecting horses - called in French "migraine," "mal de tête" (headache), "douleur de tête" (head pain), or in English "megrim(s)," "head-ach," "pain," and for which it is not self-evident that they are in any way related with the conditions that bear these names in humans - have been connected with vestibular impairments. Whatever is the relationship between the human and animal pathologies and, although it is impossible to interpret animal signs (abnormal behavior) with human symptoms (complaints), some impressive descriptions, written by Anglo-Saxon authors for the most part, seem to have played a significant role in the history of migraine. The purpose is to examine how a word in its English veterinary medical sense could have influenced French medical descriptions.