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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.
In the International Headache Society classification of headaches, the concept of aura is given a key role. It serves as a boundary between 'migraine without aura' and 'migraine with aura'. Historically, the concept of an aura was borrowed from the epilepsy vocabulary; a borrowing that took place in English medicine at the beginning of the 19th century and in French medicine in the mid-19th century. It would therefore be interesting to see which features of the epileptic aura are used to explain the migraine aura. Based on the French and English medical literature of the 19th century, two processes have been reviewed: (i) the emergence of the concept of aura, and (ii) the modifications of this concept throughout the 19th century. It appears that the original medical use of the term 'aura' as a set of rising tactile sensations was in use from the 2nd century until late in the 19th century, but then various other symptoms were recognized and the aura gradually became accepted as an early part of the seizure. By the end of the 19th century the aura that preceded a migraine was seen as a similar process, and thought of as part of the migraine sequence.
Hughlings-Jackson coined the concept of dreamy state: According to him, one of the sensations of a "dreamy state" was an odd feeling of recognition and familiarity, often called "deja vu". A clear sense of strangeness could also be experienced in the "dreamy state" ("jamais vu"). Jackson himself did not use these French terms, but he was quite clear about the vivid feelings of strangeness and familiarity, which can occur in both normal and pathological conditions. In order to explore some of the exchanges between medical and nonmedical vocabularies, we examine the historical origins of this technical concept. By basing the study on European (medical and nonmedical) literature of the nineteenth century, we review the first descriptions of this state and compare them with the famous Hughlings-Jackson definitions. It appears that this medical concept was partly borrowed from a wide cultural background before being rationally developed and reworked in the fields of neurology and psychiatry.
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