"Required reading for anyone with a head."—Mary Roach, New York Times bestselling author of Stiff and Fuzz
"[The Headache] weaves together history, biology, a survey of current research, testimony from patients, and an agonizing account of Zeller’s own suffering. . . If there’s a lesson here, it’s that pain resists mastery, but understanding, however incomplete, can offer its own form of relief."—New Yorker
From blinding migraines to severe headache disorders known as “clusters,” chronic head pain affects 40% of the population, many of them suffering in silence. Finally, The Headache reveals the science behind a group of disorders that is as much a curse as a cultural punchline, and leads to key insights into the nature of pain itself.
Guided by his own decades-long struggle with cluster headaches, veteran science journalist Tom Zeller Jr.’s journey into headache science is at once intimate and panoramic. He visits cutting-edge clinics; interviews dozens of doctors, neurologists, and fellow headache patients; participates in clinical trials for multi-million-dollar new medicines; and even experiments with psilocybin in search of relief.
Along the way, Zeller traces the longer arc of mystery around headaches, from prehistoric skull surgery to Virginia Woolf’s assertion that, in the throes of a migraine, “language runs dry,” to reveal how headaches became one of the most under-researched afflictions in medicine—and how that is slowly starting to change.
With warmth, wit, and infectious curiosity, Zeller’s search for the origins of his own headaches becomes a journey into the inner workings of the human nervous system, and an invaluable witness to one of the most maligned conditions known to medicine.
About the Author
Tom Zeller Jr. is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Undark, a nonprofit digital magazine exploring the intersection of science and society. Previously, he was a reporter and columnist at the New York Times, an editor at large for National Geographic magazine, and a Knight Science Journalism fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He lives in Lolo, Montana. The Headache is his first book.
Praise For…
“The Headache is a revelatory and moving account of a condition that is both diabolically painful and woefully misunderstood. Zeller masterfully weaves his personal story with the vaporous but tantalizing threads of medical science.” - Florence Williams, author of The Nature Fix and Heartbreak "Illuminating." - Slate "[The Headache] weaves together history, biology, a survey of current research, testimony from patients, and an agonizing account of Zeller’s own suffering. . . Readers with migraine or cluster headaches will find themselves, as I did, comparing their own experiences with the rich material in the book, which is both a survey of the field and a great cry of pain. . . If there’s a lesson here, it’s that pain resists mastery, but understanding, however incomplete, can offer its own form of relief." - New Yorker “The Headache is smart, insightful, funny, compassionate, addictively readable, and most of all necessary. It’s about time—and every sufferer out there will agree—that we try to make sense of headaches, one of medicine’s longstanding great mysteries. Tom Zeller Jr.’s book is a pioneering illumination of both the subject and the many people it touches, offering understanding tinged with hope.” - Deborah Blum, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Poisoner's Handbook “For a condition that affects 50 million Americans, migraine is surprisingly poorly understood and, as a research topic, grievously underfunded. By turns personal (cluster headache! God almighty!) and journalistic, The Headache explores the mysterious nature of headache pain and, equally mysterious, the whims of federal funding and the biases that underlie the condition's neglect. Zeller writes with intelligence, compassion, equanimity, and wit. Required reading for anyone with a head." - Mary Roach, New York Times bestselling author of Stiff and Fuzz "An important, harrowing, and ultimately hopeful book. If the path to enlightenment is to make the darkness conscious, as Carl Jung taught, then Tom Zeller Jr. is showing us the way by illuminating his own pain and those of countless others suffering from devastating headaches. The science here is skillfully explained, of course, but that's only the most obvious of this book's many virtues." - Dan Fagin, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Toms River “The Headache not only renders the monstrous dimensions of Zeller’s own headache pain, it traces the haphazard and often comically dismissive attempts by science to make sense of headache disorders writ large. In turns wry, curious, and even harrowing, the book's quest for a Sanctuary of Asclepius ultimately broadens our understanding of a remarkably understudied plague — and the new strains of science that appear to be, at long last, developing on the frontier. The Headache is an odyssey and a revelation." - Charles M. Blow, author of Fire Shut Up In My Bones and The Devil You Know “Mr. Zeller does more than dispel the myth of malingering; he powerfully argues that justice must be done for those who . . . have been failed by a medical system that still considers headache disorders ‘a trivial choice for specialization.’ . . . What Mr. Zeller’s book offers, most powerfully, is testimony. It is not merely a headache, and it deserves our attention.” - Wall Street Journal "In this absorbing, incisive account of the history of headache disorders, Zeller captures the profound human and scientific costs of medicine's neglect of these common conditions that affect millions of people—especially women—and points the way toward a more hopeful future." - Maya Dusenbery, author of Doing Harm "A sharp—and funny—account of one man’s attempt to understand why so many of us suffer head pain." - Kirkus Reviews "Moving. . .an eye-opening study of an all-too-common affliction." - Publishers Weekly
