THE INHERITANCE OF MIGRAINE

There are few maladies that cause in the aggregate as much suffering as migraine, and about which so little is known concerning either causes, mechanism, prevention or cure. By migraine I mean any headache beginning in early life, recurring regularly or irregularly over a long period of years, without a discoverable pathologic process and without materially affecting the general state of health; such headaches are predominantly frontal and unilateral and are accompanied by nausea and vomiting, soreness of the eyeballs and scalp and in the majority of persons at some time by flittering scotoma or other sensory symptoms. The hereditary nature of migraine, since it is the subject of this study, has been purposely left out of the definition just given, but any consideration of the subject will always show that, next to pain in the head during attacks, the history of similar attacks in parents and in other members