Teresa of Ávila

Saint Teresa of Ávila is invoked against headaches because she herself was a lifelong sufferer of crushing head pain and grave illness — she described agonizing headaches and a noise in her head “as if many rushing rivers” were within it, borne through years of sickness — so those who endure the same affliction turn to a saint who knew it intimately. She is patroness of religious orders, and of Catholic Spain, for the most substantive of reasons: she reformed the Carmelite Order back to its primitive rule, founding the Discalced Carmelites and seventeen convents across Spain, and her writings on prayer made her the first woman declared a Doctor of the Church. The same spiritual maternity over the religious life made her, with Saint James, a patroness of Spain itself.