#this is so lovely #i have visual snow and migraines that plague me on occasion #and i got to experience this sort of occular migraine a few months back #it really does look like that!! it's so comforting #knowing folks back then would experience it and described it as such
Actually, yknow what. I was being intentionally glib and reductive for the joke, but I’m going to walk that back because you’re so right.
Hubert Airy was a nineteenth century physician who studied visual migraines because he and his father were prone to suffer them when he was growing up. In 1870, at the age of 32, he drew and published the first illustration of an aura in the original post in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the other being drawn by Joseph Babinski in 1890. The first English description of a migraine aura was written in 1778 by physician John Fothergill, who described a “singular kind of glimmering in the sight; objects change their apparent position surrounded by luminous angles, like those of a fortification.”
And as someone who’s been known to see the colour crystals. Yeah. It’s nice to know folks saw and described the same things.