Previously used terms include erythroprosopalgia of Bing (7), ciliary or migrainous neuralgia (Harris), erythromelalgia of the head, Horton’s headache, histaminic cephalgia, petrosal neuralgia (Gardner), sphenopalatine, Vidian and Sluder’s neuralgia, and hemicrania periodica neuralgiformis. The term “cluster headache” was introduced relatively recently, in 1952, by Kunkle and colleagues (11,12). By then, CH certainly had been known for a long time under other names (10), as demonstrated by the striking similarities between this condition and most other syndromes listed in Table 85-2. The abundance of eponyms and synonyms used in the past to describe the same form may have been indirectly responsible for the late recognition of CH as such. In fact, according to Koehler (9), the first report on CH dates to 1641, when Nicolaas Tulp, a famous Dutch physician, published his Observationes Medicae, in which he describes the case of Isaak van Halmaal, who “in the beginning of the summer season, was afflicted with a very severe headache, occurring and disappearing daily on fixed hours. For rarely it lasted longer than two hours. This recurring pain lasted until the fourteenth day.…” Another probable case from the 17th century was described by Thomas Willis, who, in De Anima Brutorum, mentioned a headache whose attacks tended to recur more severely at the time of the sun’s solstice and equinox, although in most cases it struck people in between, at preferred hours during the 24-hour day (16). Nappi and Manzoni (16) also argued
that CH and chronic paroxysmal hemicrania were both described in 1747 when Oppermann, in his doctoral dissertation on “hemicrania horologica,” described the case of a 35-year-old woman who, since the age of 29 years, had been suffering from daily 15-minute attacks every hour of the day and night with such regularity as to tell the hour more accurately than the clock in the city square.