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Schott provides an interesting and exhaustive review of the medical literature, from ancient to modern times, that contains drawings of the hallucinations produced by migraine sufferers during the aura of attacks.
Of particular excellence are the illustrations of these various subjective phenomena. Schott analyzes in detail the components of these episodes, stressing their uniformity and their value in investigations of the underlying physiology. He then marshals the evidence that the primary event underlying the visual aura is spreading depression in the occipital cortex: a wave of cerebral excitation (produced, in migraine, by unknown stimuli) that results in the fortification spectra, followed by a spreading depression that produces the s…