“It may be the book that got a new generation reading, but the huge Harry Potter tomes are giving some children headaches, a US doctor says.

Dr Howard J Bennett, of George Washington University Medical Centre, has recently diagnosed ‘Hogwarts headaches’ in three young patients…

The children did not have a history of such symptoms and the only connection appeared to be that all were reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix at the time.” —The Age

This is part of a longstanding tradition in the letters section of the New England Journal of Medicine of tongue-in-cheek case series designating whimsically-named syndromes reflecting the medical consequences of contemporary cultural trends. The lay press often picks up these stories and reports on them in earnest, but, hey, this is medical humor for ya, although sometimes the cases are poignant. It can be read, more profoundly, as a somewhat ironic comment on the human propensity, which reaches its greatest and most tortured fruition with the medical field’s ‘designer diseases’, for endless classification and subdivision of categories.