During the 1860s a group of well-known British ‘men of science’ - including David Brewster (astronomer and inventor of the kaleidoscope), George Biddell Airy (astronomer) and John Herschel (astronomer and photographer) - corresponded in scientific journals about the temporary visual disturbances that they had experienced. They accompanied their discussions with intricate diagrams of how pulsating spots, arcs, zigzags and blindspots of a disorder known as ‘scintillating scotoma’ obscured and moved across part or all of the visual field.

These men understood their auras not as disease per se, but as a natural extension and confirmation of their scientific endeavours and persona, informing ongoing debates about vision, sight and scientific objectivity. Their accounts are conspicuously devoid of admissions of pain, weakness, or distraction. Moreover, they did not use the term migraine. This paper will examine how, by the 1890s, these images gained the status of scientific ‘truth’, and came to define a new understanding of migraine that had become acceptable, in no small part, because of the authority of these men of science. Confirmed as beautiful, accurate and most importantly ‘trustworthy’ by Sir William Gowers, these images have become foundational documents for modern understandings of migraine.

For over a century now, other sufferers’ depictions of migraine experience - particularly self-portraits, or artworks that represent pain - have been tested against these ‘scientific’ images, and either accepted as authentically migrainous, or rejected as useless, their reliability compromised by impaired concentration and disturbed cognition. By examining the creation of a very particular kind of medical knowledge, and the subsequent work that has been done on behalf of this knowledge, this paper challenges an extant history of migraine. In addition, I will suggest that the history of these images raises important questions about the relationship between medical imagery and art, and the status of ‘illustration’ versus ‘evidence’.