Migraine affects a significant minority of the population, appearing in all cultures and recognized since the dawn of recorded history. For Julius Caesar, the Apostle Paul, Kant, and Freud, it may have been a scourge or an excuse to forge their character, but for the millions of anonymous people who suffer secretly and silently, it is a daily reality.

Its forms and symptoms are "unruly, vague, and so infinitely varied that even Proteus himself cannot compete with the multitude of forms it takes," as Robert Burton observed regarding melancholy. Its nature and causes have remained an unsolved enigma for Hippocrates and have since then, for two thousand years, been a subject of controversy.

Many of the patients who experience migraine—especially the young people who experience the migraine aura or a classic migraine attack for the first time—have no idea what is happening to them and panic, believing they are having a stroke, that they have a brain tumor, etc., or conversely, that they are going crazy or suffering from some peculiar hysteria. Their relief is immense when they learn that what is happening to them is neither serious nor fabricated, but a psychologically neutral, recurring yet essentially benign condition that they share with countless others, and which is known and completely understandable.

"The fear that this condition causes you when you don't know it crushes you," writes Montaigne. The patient who reads Migraine will not be cured but will at least know what they suffer from and what it means. They will thus stop fearing it.

Of course, the book is not merely a description but a reflection on the nature of health and illness and how human beings may occasionally need to be ill for a short period. It is also a reflection on the unity of mind and body and on migraine as a model of our psychosomatic transparency and, finally, a reflection on migraine as a biological reaction, akin to those exhibited by many animals.

I believe that these broader considerations of migraine as part of the human condition are also significant as they contribute to the stable classification of the condition.

"This volume is an essential asset and tool for the modern 'migraine specialist,' a guide to clinical perception for the neurologist, a source of knowledge and therapeutic maneuvers for healthcare professionals—especially those dealing with patients with brain disorders—at least revealing for those with migraines, so they can understand the pathways of creation, transmission, and manifestation of head pain and migraine in particular, but also a pillar of thought for scholars, especially those interested in brain behaviors.

For migraine is indeed an astonishing model for studying brain function, encompassing functions unfairly shared between Psychiatry and Neurology, as if the subjects of these two sciences were different; falsely, since only this is, the same and a brain, the organ they study.

Of the patient." –Demos-Dimitris Mitsikostas, MD, PhD, FEAN Associate Professor of Neurology, EKPA President of the Hellenic Headache Society