This wonky weather we've been having is messing with me. I am having aura symptoms of a migraine and I'm a little annoyed. Sometimes, I think about Hildegarde Von Bingen and how her visions were often described by people as symptoms of an ocular migraine. It makes me curious how she treated her pain? I don't think that they had access to opium in late medieval Germany. Did she apply a poultice of herbs and lay in a dark cell, praying for the agony to pass? Or did she accept the agony as a sign of her lowly status in the earthly realm and just suffer in the dark until light no longer made her feel like she was going to vomit?
All of this makes me also wonder how such things would have been treated in the world of Evandar. As I read through herbals and consider what I'm learning, it makes me curious about ancient cures from our world and what their cognates would be in my storybook world. Did you know that ground up mummies were soaked in wine and then handkerchiefs were dipped in them before being applied to the person's head that was suffering a headache? It's mentioned in Shakespeare's play Othello and it was part of legit medical practice from that era. Possibly earlier, actually. And then there is the practice of blood letting, which has always horrified me to be honest.
Rambling aside, I'm still trying to get going on material for here. Life keeps getting in the way. Friday, the kids have off from school. I don't think I'm getting much of anything done then. And I am sitting here craving gummy bears to an almost violent degree as other migraine aura symptoms are making themselves known. I think I blew my writing time today looking at cat videos as I was trying not to be super anxious over existence. One of the problems of having a vivid imagination is that it is very easy to imagine you are going to die from food poisoning when you're just having run of the mill stomach troubles, for example.
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