Dead Ends is a enjoyable, macabre medical historical past for teenagers

In 1890, a German scientist named Robert Koch thought he’d invented a remedy for tuberculosis, a substance derived from the infecting bacterium itself that he dubbed Tuberculin. His substance didn’t really remedy anybody, however it was finally extensively used as a diagnostic skin test. Koch’s profitable failure is simply one of many many colourful circumstances featured in Dead Ends! Flukes, Flops, and Failures that Sparked Medical Marvels, a brand new nonfiction illustrated youngsters’s e book by science historian Lindsey Fitzharris and her husband, cartoonist Adrian Teal.

A famous science communicator with a passion for the medically macabre, Fitzharris printed a biography of surgical pioneer Joseph Lister, The Butchering Art, in 2017—an important, if often grisly, learn. She adopted up with 2022’s  The Facemaker: A Visionary Surgeon’s Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I, a couple of WWI surgeon named Harold Gillies who rebuilt the faces of injured troopers.

And in 2020, she hosted a documentary for the Smithsonian Channel, The Curious Life and Death Of…, exploring well-known deaths, starting from drug lord Pablo Escobar to magician Harry Houdini. Fitzharris carried out digital autopsies, experimented with blood samples, interviewed witnesses, and carried out real-time demonstrations in hopes of gleaning contemporary insights. For his half, Teal is a well known caricaturist and illustrator, greatest recognized for his work on the British TV sequence Spitting Image. His work has additionally appeared in The Guardian and the Sunday Telegraph, amongst different shops.

The couple determined to collaborate on youngsters’s books as a option to mix their respective expertise. Granted, “[The market for] children’s nonfiction is very difficult,” Fitzharris advised Ars. “It doesn’t sell that well in general. It’s very difficult to get publishers on board with it. It’s such a shame because I really feel that there’s a hunger for it, especially when I see the kids picking up these books and loving it. There’s also just a need for it with the decline in literacy rates. We need to get people more engaged with these topics in ways that go beyond a 30-second clip on TikTok.”

Their first foray into the market was 2023’s Plague-Busters! Medicine’s Battles with History’s Deadliest Diseases, exploring “the ickiest illnesses that have infected humans and affected civilizations through the ages”—in addition to the medical breakthroughs that took place to fight these ailments. Dead Ends is one thing of a sequel, focusing this time on historic diagnoses, experiments, and coverings that had been ineffective at greatest, steadily dangerous, but finally led to surprising medical breakthroughs.