Aching heads, making medicine: Gender and legitimacy in headache

This dissertation examines the social construction of migraine and cluster headache to explore how assumptions about gender become embedded in the cultural representations of disease and the production of scientific knowledge. I draw on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, as well as historical and cultural analyses to examine headache conditions from diverse perspectives. My research traces the different ways that gender informed the development of headache research in the early 20th century through to recent medical studies. I set this research against a cultural analysis of the rhetoric and representation of headache in American popular culture. I find that migraine and cluster headache suffer from a crisis of legitimacy. Despite the fact that headache is one of the most common and disabling conditions in the United States, few resources are allocated to its diagnosis and treatment, and sufferers frequently face discrimination and stigma. Part of the problem stems from a spotted history of psychosomatic medicine that placed blame on patients\u27 (particularly women\u27s) inability to cope with stress. Different stakeholders in the headache community (scientists, activists, physicians and pharmaceutical companies) strive to promote migraine as a legitimate biological disease, worthy of medical treatment, by focusing on migraine as a neurobiological disorder. Nevertheless, I find that assumptions about gender continue to play an important role in the construction of knowledge about migraine and cluster headache