Western medical and social archives reveal that migraine was a specific head pain long recognized by physicians. However, depending on historical and social contexts, records show differing terminology and varying accounts of symptoms. This chapter provides a brief history of migraine, highlighting a few physicians’ fundamental contributions that shaped knowledge of the disorder, and engaging with concepts that circulated between medical texts and nonspecialist social representations. After briefly examining the etymology of “migraine,” the chapter foregrounds Egyptian and Greco-Roman thought to the early-modern scientific rejection of humoral theory. Works of the later-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are given emphasis due to those eras’ developments in neurology and specific focus upon migraine. The chapter ends with a review of competing theories of migraine pathogenesis, and some pharmaceutical innovations of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.