ArticleMedical history2014
Making modern migraine medieval: men of science, Hildegard of Bingen and the life of a retrospective diagnosis.
Article in Medical history, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed, 29 citations in OpenAlex.
- Veteran welfare past and present: a sociological analysis of the Civil War Petitions, 1642-1718.Frontiers in sociology · 2025Article
- "Heroic" medicine in neurology: A historical perspective.European journal of neurology · 2024Article
- Historical and social science perspectives on food allergy.Clinical and experimental allergy : journal of the British Society for Allergy and Clinical Immunology · 2023Review
- Past, present and imaginary: Pathography in all its forms.Health (London, England : 1997) · 2023Article
- Epilepsy and the "dark" literature of the Greek novelist Demosthenes Voutyras: an outstanding epileptic personality.Arquivos de neuro-psiquiatria · 2023Article
- From "Transient Hemiopsia" to Migraine Aura.Vision (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Charles Singer's retrospective diagnosis of Hildegard of Bingen as a migraine sufferer, first made in 1913, has become commonly accepted. This article uses Hildegard as a case study to shift our focus from a polarised debate about the merits or otherwise of retrospective diagnosis, to examine instead what happens when diagnoses take on lives of their own. It argues that simply championing or rejecting retrospective diagnosis is not enough; that we need instead to appreciate how, at the moment of creation, a diagnosis reflects the significance of particular medical signs and theories in historical context and how, when and why such diagnoses can come to do meaningful work when subsequently mobilised as scientific 'fact'. This article first traces the emergence of a new formulation of migraine in the nineteenth century, then shows how this context enabled Singer to retrospectively diagnose Hildegard's migraine and finally examines some of the ways in which this idea has gained popular and academic currency in the second half of the twentieth century. The case of Hildegard's migraine reminds us of the need to historicise scientific evidence just as rigorously as we historicise our other material and it exposes the cumulative methodological problems that can occur when historians use science, and scientists use history on a casual basis.
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.