Janice Zehentbauer | Sheridan Institute of Technology & Advanced Learning (original) (raw)

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Papers by Janice Zehentbauer

In the nineteenth-century, British and French physicians and ophthalmologists began to pay more a... more In the nineteenth-century, British and French physicians and ophthalmologists began to pay more attention to the neurological condition variously known as “megrim,” “sick-headache,” “bilious headache” and “hemicrania,” cataloguing it under the term “migraine,” as we know it today. Western medicine had long recognized migraine and its symptoms, and knew that it entailed more than headaches; nausea (or “biliousness”), aphasia, scotoma (disturbances in the visual field), and paraesthesiae (the numbness or tingling of a hand or foot) are all symptoms attendant to migraine. These symptoms occur during the “aura” phase of the migraine, acting not only as a warning of the impending headache, but also marking the moment in which the sufferer falls into a liminal, indeterminate space. During the aura, a sufferer retains an acute state of consciousness while experiencing extreme sensory overload. Although nineteenth-century doctors started to realize the hereditary nature of migraine, they also started to “gender” migraine; for example, Pierre-Adolphe Piorry concludes that male physicians, university students, and office workers were susceptible because of “brain work,” while women were more susceptible because of their “sedentary” lives. This paper explores the intersection of medical texts and the appearance of the migraineur in literary fiction in the nineteenth-century. Figures of migraine sufferers Auguste Vabre in Émile Zola’s Pot-Bouille (1882), and Trilby in George DuMaurier’s Trilby (1894), both transgress normative gender boundaries of their era. Migraines in both novels become emblematic of bodies that cannot be contained.

In the nineteenth-century, British and French physicians and ophthalmologists began to pay more a... more In the nineteenth-century, British and French physicians and ophthalmologists began to pay more attention to the neurological condition variously known as “megrim,” “sick-headache,” “bilious headache” and “hemicrania,” cataloguing it under the term “migraine,” as we know it today. Western medicine had long recognized migraine and its symptoms, and knew that it entailed more than headaches; nausea (or “biliousness”), aphasia, scotoma (disturbances in the visual field), and paraesthesiae (the numbness or tingling of a hand or foot) are all symptoms attendant to migraine. These symptoms occur during the “aura” phase of the migraine, acting not only as a warning of the impending headache, but also marking the moment in which the sufferer falls into a liminal, indeterminate space. During the aura, a sufferer retains an acute state of consciousness while experiencing extreme sensory overload. Although nineteenth-century doctors started to realize the hereditary nature of migraine, they also started to “gender” migraine; for example, Pierre-Adolphe Piorry concludes that male physicians, university students, and office workers were susceptible because of “brain work,” while women were more susceptible because of their “sedentary” lives. This paper explores the intersection of medical texts and the appearance of the migraineur in literary fiction in the nineteenth-century. Figures of migraine sufferers Auguste Vabre in Émile Zola’s Pot-Bouille (1882), and Trilby in George DuMaurier’s Trilby (1894), both transgress normative gender boundaries of their era. Migraines in both novels become emblematic of bodies that cannot be contained.