Signed Hardcover

October 14, 2025 Publication Date

From New York Times bestselling author Lindsey Fitzharris and caricaturist Adrian Teal, a riveting middle-grade nonfiction book about medicine's most fascinating flukes, flops, and failures.

Through the history of medicine, some disasters were all downside. But what looked like a dead end was sometimes just a change of direction in disguise . . .

Beheadings! Bloodletting! Bodysnatching! Journey down a snaking road bristling with medicine’s most astonishing “dead ends.” Marvel at the diagnoses, experiments, and treatments that were frequently useless, and often harmful, but that sometimes led doctors to discoveries that changed the world for the better.

Enjoy a whirlwind tour of the human body—from brain, to heart, to limbs—during which New York Times bestselling author Lindsey Fitzharris and Adrian Teal will guide you through centuries of medical mistakes, festooned with riveting facts, pitch-perfect humor, and vivid illustrations. Enjoy the flukes, flops, and failures that have given science a better understanding of our bodies and ways to treat them.

This fascinating book of foul-ups is sure to delight young readers, and inspire them to embrace their failures, too!

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