Robert E. Lee Migraine Headaches

If you suffer from migraine headaches, maybe it’s hard to look at the glass as half-full. But you might be interested to know that you are a part of a club with some very famous members.

Historical figures and celebrities that were known to struggle with migraine include Thomas Jefferson, Lewis Carroll, Robert E. Lee, Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, Ulysses S. Grant, Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, Vincent Van Gogh, Sigmund Freud, and Friedrich Nietzsche. So it seems that with great genius, comes great, reoccurring headaches.

So even though you may feel in pain, it might be comforting to know you’re in good company. But don’t worry, you don’t have to be driven to suicide like Woolf. But while modern-day medicines may prevent your migraine, as a result you may never feel compelled enough to write tortured poems and paint insane, impressionist images like Emily Dickinson and Vincent Van Gogh did whenever they felt that throbbing head pain. It is even thought that Lewis Carroll’s children’s classic Alice in Wonderland might have been inspired by the author’s migraine auras.

But even more interesting, perhaps, is that both Civil War heroes, Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant, were plagued by migraine headaches. For Robert E. Lee, migraine headaches may have lost him the war – who knows? But the Confederacy and the Union were both commanded by generals suffering from terrible and severe headaches.  Maybe that’s why they couldn’t get along.

This nifty trivia may be little consolation when you’re holed up in your room with the lights turned off and the covers over your head, praying the pain will go away soon, but maybe the next time you feel a headache coming on you can grab a pen and write a great fiction or try to take over an empire. Pretend you’re not experiencing migraine headaches, but Robert E. Lee migraine headaches!

No pain, no gain, right?