Special Episode: Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris and Adrian Teal & Dead Ends!

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Speaker 1 Hi, I'm Erin Welsh, and this is This Podcast Will Kill You.

Speaker 1 Welcome to another episode of the TPWKY Book Club series, where I interview authors of popular science and medicine books about their latest exciting work.

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Speaker 1 Contrary to popular belief, failure is an option. In fact, sometimes it's an unavoidable outcome, especially when it comes to science and medicine.

Speaker 1 Your results don't support your initial hypothesis, your experiment goes horribly awry, the new treatment you were testing didn't lead to any improvement.

Speaker 1 The inevitability of failure doesn't take the sting away or make your ego any less bruised. We view these failures as setbacks, keeping science from moving forward.

Speaker 1 In reality, failure is a fundamental part of progress.

Speaker 1 When we reflect on the history of science and medicine, we tend to highlight the triumphs, the breakthroughs, the inventions that cured diseases and saved lives.

Speaker 1 We spend a whole lot less time on the ideas or gadgets that didn't quite work out.

Speaker 1 But those stumbles are just as important to the advancement of science and medicine than the celebrated success stories.

Speaker 1 And it's about time we acknowledged what they've helped us to achieve, which is not only knowledge, like how to not do something,

Speaker 1 but also that failure is okay.

Speaker 1 In this week's episode, we are thrilled to be joined by medical historian and award-winning author Dr.

Speaker 1 Lindsay Fitzharris and caricaturist and cartoonist Adrienne Thiel to discuss their latest book, Dead Ends, Flukes, Flops, and Failures That Sparked Medical Marvels.

Speaker 1 Dead Ends is this power couple's second book geared to younger audiences, middle school age, but honestly, I think that all ages would love it.

Speaker 1 And in it, they showcase some of the shocking, strange, and often humorous ways that medicine didn't quite get it right the first or second or third time.

Speaker 1 Stories featuring observations of guillotine heads, terrifying saws to speed up amputations, fad diets, and cow milk transfusions are accompanied by delightful and vivid illustrations of the physicians involved in these outlandish experiments.

Speaker 1 Blending dark humor with fascinating factoids, Fitzharris and Thiel take readers on a frolicking journey that spans the centuries of medical mishaps.

Speaker 1 But underneath the riveting stories and grotesque illustrations is a powerful lesson. Failure is an essential part of science.
It's easy to get frustrated when science doesn't have all the answers.

Speaker 1 Because of the way science is taught as a set of facts, as a forward march of progress, we don't realize how much we're still figuring things out and that the knowledge that that we have today will at some point in the future be replaced.

Speaker 1 Dead Ends reminds readers that it's okay to fail. Erin and I have been dying to have Lindsay Fitzharris on this podcast for the longest time.

Speaker 1 Her other books, The Butchering Art and The Facemaker, geared to adult audiences, are some of our all-time faves. And so Erin will actually be joining me for this episode.

Speaker 1 And I am so thrilled to share this with you all. So with only the slightest bit more ado in the form of an ad break, let's get right to the interview.

Speaker 1 Lindsay and Adrian, welcome to the show. This has been such a long time coming.
We are thrilled to have you here.

Speaker 11 We are so excited as well and to share some gory stories of medical history with you guys.

Speaker 21 Yeah, great to be.

Speaker 22 We're thrilled. I am a

Speaker 19 huge fangirl.

Speaker 22 One of my professors gave us all of the students in my med school class the butchering art like before we graduated as a gift. And that was my like introduction.

Speaker 22 And I've just been obsessed ever since. So I am really fangirling right now.

Speaker 11 You know,

Speaker 11 was that your first introduction to medical history as a subject?

Speaker 22 I think so, honestly. I mean, we had already been doing the podcast.
So like I knew, you know, from Aaron, I had learned a lot of things. But yeah, we don't learn medical history in med school.

Speaker 22 And so it was like, and I think that's why he gifted it to everyone because he found it also to be like so important and like such a huge part of what we never actually learn. And I just was amazed.

Speaker 11 It's interesting because in the UK, where I live, despite this Chicago accent, I've lived here for for 23 years.

Speaker 11 In Britain, though, they do teach medical history to medical students in the first year, which I think is great because I think it's really important that doctors be able to contextualize.

Speaker 11 where they've come from, where they're going.

Speaker 11 And I always tell audiences when I talk about the butchering art, which is about Joseph Lister and germ theory, what we know today isn't going to be what we know tomorrow.

Speaker 11 And we have to keep an open mind. And that's very much what Dead Ends, this children's book, is about as well.

Speaker 1 I loved so much all of the stories of Dead Ends, but I also loved the message.

Speaker 1 And so I'm very curious how you got the initial spark of the idea for this book and then how that evolved eventually into the ultimate message that this, that this book tells.

Speaker 11 Yeah, well,

Speaker 11 I'm going to pull out. See, now people who follow me and have followed my brand for a long time, they're so sick of this story, but I'm going to do it anyway.

Speaker 23 That includes me.

Speaker 19 I know.

Speaker 11 Blockworks saw, so I used to have a YouTube series called Under the Knife. And the way into the stories was through objects.

Speaker 11 And so the first one we ever did was on the clockwork saw and we created a replica of it. And it was one of my favorite weird objects from medical history because it was a massive failure.

Speaker 11 And it was invented by this guy named W.H.B. Winchester in the 19th century at a time when speed was really important.
And so the idea behind it, you always call it the pizza wheel of the dude.

Speaker 21 The pizza cutter of doom.

Speaker 19 That's right, yeah.

Speaker 11 So it's circular, for people who are just listening, it's a circular saw.

Speaker 11 And in the middle, middle, there would have been a crank, and you would crank it, you would release it, and it would continuously spin. And so he thought this was great.

Speaker 11 He takes it into the operating theater, and it ends up, it's way too unwieldy, and he ends up taking off his assistant's finger. So this is a bit of a disaster.

Speaker 11 And in fact, it was so bad that it never made it out of prototype phase. And so there's only one in existence, which is at the Hunterian Museum in London.
We've recreated it here.

Speaker 11 And I just, I've always loved failure as a concept.

Speaker 11 And I think it's something that we don't talk about enough in science and medicine right you know and we saw we were talking earlier with a journalist about the COVID pandemic and how people were really uncomfortable with the advice changing but to me that was a comfort that meant that our doctors are learning more about this virus and that they're changing their advice and that's exactly what you want to see with the scientific process so yeah and that's part of the scientific method is that you change your theories and you change your approach your practices as more information comes in that's how you want the world to be you know Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 21 And so, this book, as much as anything else, it is about that kind of the evolution of the scientific method and how, you know, the things you could get away with two, three hundred years ago as a scientist or doctor, you certainly aren't going to be getting away with today because things, you know, evolve and change, and that's how it should be.

Speaker 11 Yeah, and it's not just okay to fail, it's essential to fail, especially in medicine and science. And we're hoping that that will resonate with kids.

Speaker 11 You know, everybody in the age of social media is obsessed with perfection,

Speaker 11 you know, presenting a perfect version of ourselves, a perfect version of our own histories. And, you know, if you think you've made a mistake, look at, you know, some of these geniuses from the past.

Speaker 11 A lot of them have wrapped up some pretty big mistakes.

Speaker 21 Somebody like Thomas Edison, who's by no means perfect, but he did say, you know, I haven't failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that don't work.

Speaker 13 Right. Yeah.

Speaker 21 It's part of the process of getting to where you need to be rather than having to be ashamed of.

Speaker 11 So we always loved failure, but also Adrian, who's my husband, he has a very particular set of skills as a caricaturist. I have a very particular set of skills.

Speaker 11 And we were like, how can we combine this into something

Speaker 11 that could be useful to people? Because we.

Speaker 24 That's how the first book, The Plague,

Speaker 21 was born, really, wasn't it? Because we just wanted to work together on something. And Lindsay's great with the history and she's great with getting the stories, you know, structured and fashionable.

Speaker 23 Oh, I know where this is going.

Speaker 21 What I do is because I'm a man-child, I can make it then friendly for kids. So I can then look at it.

Speaker 11 Because Lindsay will be writing something and say, I don't know how to make this, you know readable i said well don't worry about that just write it like you'd write it for an adult and then we can yeah work that out later on you know yeah unsurprisingly it was very difficult to take these complex concepts and then whittle it down and so that that was a real challenge but you brought the humor and the great illustrations and you know helped dig up a lot of these stories we'll let you get a word in in a minute but what i was going to say i think we're going to say was that um

Speaker 21 With a kid's book, you've only got 20, 25,000 words to play with. So you'd think, oh, well, that's easy.
You know, it's not a very long book.

Speaker 21 But actually, that means you have to choose every word really carefully. And so if you're trying to explain complicated scientific processes, that can be quite tricky.

Speaker 21 So you're trying to walk a fine line, aren't you, really?

Speaker 24 Yeah, definitely.

Speaker 22 I love, though, that you guys not only managed to squeeze so much information in, but also like use words like butthole multiple times

Speaker 19 throughout.

Speaker 23 Well,

Speaker 21 the editor was quite keen on the idea of taking that out. And I said, no, there's a poetry to the word butthole that you just can't.

Speaker 24 There really is.

Speaker 19 Absolutely.

Speaker 19 Absolutely. That is the sentence.

Speaker 11 I have to add that

Speaker 11 we dedicated this book to our mentors. And mine is Dr.
Margaret Pelling, who's a very serious historian at Oxford, who is my supervisor. And I don't know yet how she's going to view this, but

Speaker 11 she was like, oh, it's great to see medical history being brought to younger and younger people.

Speaker 11 Over here in Britain, we have something called Horrible Histories, which was huge in your generation growing up.

Speaker 11 And so we kind of hope that that's filling a slot over in the US with this kind of book. So

Speaker 1 let's take a quick break. And when we get back, there's still so much to discuss.

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Speaker 1 Welcome back, everyone. We've been chatting with Dr.
Lindsay Fitzharris and Adrienne Thiel about their book, Dead Ends, Flukes, Flops, and Failures That Sparked Medical Marvels.

Speaker 1 Let's get back into things.

Speaker 22 In addition to the story that you had already mentioned about that, you know, first failure of a saw, there are so many other incredible stories jam-packed in this book.

Speaker 22 Another favorite, which I think is also in the butchering art, is Liston's 300% case fatality surgery.

Speaker 1 It's one of my favorites.

Speaker 20 It's so good.

Speaker 22 I mean, it's so depressing, but so good.

Speaker 20 So

Speaker 22 I'm wondering, like, where exactly, obviously you are a medical historian, but like, where do you come across these stories?

Speaker 22 Do you have just like a running list that you're like, how many can we jam-pack in here? Or how do you keep track of them all?

Speaker 11 Yeah, I mean, they're everywhere in medical history, I have to say.

Speaker 11 And again, you know, I mean, even when I was writing The Facemaker, which is about Harold Gillies, who was rebuilding soldiers' faces in the First World War, I think I said something like, you know, failure was his constant companion.

Speaker 11 And again, really important for Gillies and what he was able to achieve. And some of the stories we tell in this book are dark.

Speaker 11 And, you know, we, I feel that we should acknowledge the failures of the past and acknowledge the harm that was also done, because to hide it feels conspiratorial.

Speaker 11 And we are living in an age where there is a decline in science literacy, there's a decline in literacy period across the board.

Speaker 11 And so I think it's important to tell the whole picture, but the balance is making sure that we're always, you know, cheering on science and medicine because what we've been able to accomplish over these centuries is incredible.

Speaker 11 You know, Adrian and I recently, we both went through cancer. I went through breast cancer and he went through prostate cancer.
And we caught ours very early.

Speaker 11 I always say we're living examples of why early diagnosis is life-saving. And when people get diagnosed that I know, I always say today is the best day to be diagnosed with cancer.

Speaker 11 And tomorrow is going to be even better because the advances we are making are tremendous. You know, my mother had a double mastectomy in 2012.

Speaker 11 And between that and 2022, when I was diagnosed, even in that short span, the differences in our treatment were palpable. So So, medical history is littered with failure.

Speaker 11 And there is a comical value. You know, Robert Liston, he's 6'2 ⁇ .
He's this really tall guy.

Speaker 11 He's known as the fastest knife in the West End. He can hold you down with his left arm and take off your leg in 30 seconds, which is exactly what you would want in a pre-anesthetic era.

Speaker 11 But he does have these sort of comical failures. I mean, I'll say comical to us today.

Speaker 21 Yeah, because we all know, you know, comedy equals tragedy plus time, right?

Speaker 24 Yeah, right.

Speaker 19 You know,

Speaker 21 you can look at at it with some distance.

Speaker 11 Maybe not so comical. You know,

Speaker 11 the assistant whose finger was accidentally cut off and he dies of infection and

Speaker 11 the patient dies of infection. And then there's a spectator who he slashes the coat and he dies of fright.
And it's jokingly referred to as the only operation with a 300% mortality rate.

Speaker 11 And it is kind of funny, but you know, when you look at somebody like Liston, who had these very dramatic failures, if I was transported to a pre-anesthetic era, I would still want Robert Liston to do the amputation because he still was the best of the best.

Speaker 11 And I also remind people that as sort of funny as these stories are because they're so removed from us today, it would have been really frustrating as a doctor to go into that operating theater and to keep losing patient after patient.

Speaker 11 You are in the business of saving lives and you cannot figure out what is killing your patients.

Speaker 11 And until Joseph Lister comes along with germ theory, it was really demoralizing, I can imagine. So, you know, there's always that element too.
You know, imagine being a doctor at this time.

Speaker 11 And when I talk to plastic surgeons about Harold Gillies, you know, I can tell that they're looking at the photos and thinking, hmm, I would have done that differently.

Speaker 11 And then I say, well, let me point out what you couldn't have done over 100 years ago. There was no antibiotics.
There was no, you know, yada, yada, yada.

Speaker 11 And so it's important to remember always that the people we're talking about were really trying to help, but they did sometimes inadvertently cause harm.

Speaker 21 And that's another point we make is that, you know, even when we're talking about remedies that just seem completely insane to us now that were happening two, three hundred years ago, they were doing the best they could with the science they had available at the time.

Speaker 21 Right. And that's all you can ask of the people that are trying to help you, isn't it? Really?

Speaker 11 I always ask people, what do you think, you know, in a hundred years? And for me, I always think it's going to be chemotherapy. I think we're going to find better things to replace it.

Speaker 11 Chemotherapy is very harsh on the patient, as we know. So eventually we might find something that can replace it.
Right now, it's the most effective thing we have in our arsenal against many cancers.

Speaker 11 But it's one of those treatments I'd love to see replaced in the future with something just as effective, if not more effective.

Speaker 1 Right. It'll be featured in the sequel to Dead Ends, but 100 years from now.

Speaker 1 Can you believe that they did this?

Speaker 22 They used to just inject us with all of these things.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 I want to talk about the art in Dead Ends because like we talked about, you know, comedy equals tragedy plus time and comedy also equals this incredible art that just is the chef's kiss perfection to all of these incredible stories.

Speaker 1 And I want to know more about the process of integrating these illustrations into the stories. Like what comes first? How do those stories change?

Speaker 1 How do you decide which snapshot to represent, you know, this particular story?

Speaker 21 Well, throughout most of my career, if I've been doing illustration, it's usually been illustrating somebody else's work. So

Speaker 21 we had a sort of unfair advantage here because if I had a great idea for a cartoon, we could tweak the text to make sure that it helped the cartoon along, you know.

Speaker 21 So that's always good.

Speaker 21 The other thing is that I think is important about this book and Plaguebusters is that we're dealing with a lot of historical characters that kids and most adults won't have heard of.

Speaker 21 So the names won't really mean anything to them.

Speaker 21 But if you can produce a caricature of them and give give them some personality, it brings them alive in a way that, you know, a photo from the 19th century of somebody standing, you know, sitting very stiffly in a Poe's portrait, that won't convey.

Speaker 11 We have Poe right back there that we did.

Speaker 11 You know, he's a great caricaturist, and you were fascinated with faces from the very start.

Speaker 11 And he, as a little boy, over here in Britain, there was a big show called Spitting Image, and they used these caricatured puppets, and it was political satire.

Speaker 11 And your father, who was was a pharmacist didn't know what to do with you right and so he called the creators a spitting image and so Adrian as a little boy maybe 10 years old yeah would go to the workshop and he would learn how to sculpt these these puppets

Speaker 21 to think three-dimensionally yeah and so they they brought the show back recently and you can see it now on TikTok and YouTube and it seems like a time to bring political satire back let's put it that way yeah and um you've you've done 80% of the puppets and it's been really good fun but it's always about first impressions isn't it it's about personality and and it's about first impressions and it's about making someone look more like themselves than they they do themselves yeah you're not always you're not really making fun of that well i mean there is an element of that of course there is but it's also about it's about celebrating what makes that person that person right yeah and you know that that's why it's great to do it with historical characters because then they come along he has this really great way of zoning in on the thing that makes your face unique but the other thing about the illustrations as well is that sometimes it's about not doing an illustration if we've written a good enough description of something, if we've painted a vivid enough word picture, and it's, you know, as is often the case in this, quite gruesome, you don't really need to have an illustration there to gild the lily, if you see what I mean.

Speaker 21 So it's good sometimes just to leave it alone, you know?

Speaker 24 So you have to be selective.

Speaker 11 I have to say, too, the publisher, you know, they get very nervous. Adults get more nervous.
I think that kids can handle a lot more gruesome stuff than they give the kids credit for.

Speaker 11 So there's always this push and pull about, you know, how much is too much and what to put in.

Speaker 11 And the original cover for this book, we tell the story of the guillotined heads during the French Revolution and the doctors who sort of hilariously tried to shout at them and see if there was any kind of level of consciousness left.

Speaker 11 And so your idea, tell them what the cover was.

Speaker 21 My original cover was to have the guillotine and then have a severed head at the bottom of the guillotine.

Speaker 11 Cartoon.

Speaker 21 A doctor with a stethoscope listening to the head to see if there are any signs of life. And they said, oh, I can't do that.
It's far too gruesome.

Speaker 21 But now what we've got, which seems to be fine apparently, is somebody, a corpse being electrocuted.

Speaker 21 So it's sometimes hard to see

Speaker 1 where the line is.

Speaker 21 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 11 I mean, even with Plague Busters, actually,

Speaker 11 I really loved our original concept for the cover. And again, they were like, no.
And it was basically the plague doctor with the beaked mask. And he had a crystal ball in front of him.

Speaker 11 And there were floating

Speaker 11 germs.

Speaker 11 And it was kind kind of like what's the next big thing gonna be which I thought was a really good nod to you know that the there will be more pandemics you know my grandma would call me during COVID and she'd say have you ever heard of anything like this and I was like yes grandma I'm a historian in fact the the last one happened you know and so we would we would we were constantly having this conversation um but I liked it but they said well um crystal balls aren't real is what they said yeah so we were

Speaker 21 but then the concept did come up with what they did like. It had dancing plague rats in the background.

Speaker 24 And, you know,

Speaker 1 again,

Speaker 1 because dancing plague rats are real. Yeah.

Speaker 20 Totally makes sense. Totally makes sense.

Speaker 22 The very first chapter, I think,

Speaker 22 the first image is, you know, a head on a spike

Speaker 22 with just blood everywhere. And we, as we were reading it right before bedtime the other night, I turned to that page and my son was like,

Speaker 22 and I was like, Is this going to be too scary? And he's like, No, keep going.

Speaker 21 This is what I was saying: kids are really kids are horrible,

Speaker 25 but in the best way, you know, I don't think I have a problem with it.

Speaker 11 I grew up on a diet of Stephen King, unsurprisingly. So, I was, you know, I was definitely, I think, you know, again, it is about kind of balancing that already.

Speaker 21 It depends on the child, doesn't it?

Speaker 25 It does. Yeah, you know, but

Speaker 11 I think a good morbid curiosity is a healthy thing for a child. And, you know,

Speaker 11 I can remember, you know, my grandmother partly raised me, and we would go to the cemeteries all the time. And people, a lot of people think that's very creepy.

Speaker 11 But for me, it's when I first became interested in the past and the people who lived in the past and how did they live and how did they die and what was their experiences.

Speaker 11 So I think cemeteries are these wonderful, love-filled places because people spend money and thought and time, you know, memorializing somebody's life.

Speaker 11 But, you know, again, it's what you're exposed to, I suppose, at a younger age.

Speaker 21 I grew up watching and loving Monty Python and, you know, Terry Gilliam's animations on Monty Python.

Speaker 21 So if you grow up weird, you're going to, you know, stay weird, aren't you? Usually, yeah,

Speaker 23 this is it.

Speaker 11 I was honored by my high school last year, which was fairly hilarious. And we went back, you had the most American experience of your life going back to this American high school.

Speaker 11 And I got up and said, I guess I'm the proof that the weird kids can thrive after school. And, you know, I mean, I'm sure you guys too, you had that, you know, that weirdness in you.

Speaker 11 And, you know, you're doctors, but you do this great podcast and you have this real passion for science communication and getting those crazy stories out there and getting people passionate about,

Speaker 11 you know, this world of medicine. And so I just, I think the weird kids, we do, we survive and thrive.

Speaker 19 Yeah.

Speaker 22 I think the weird kids also, we tend to find each other.

Speaker 19 Yes.

Speaker 22 And you guys mentioned that, especially as you were starting your first book together, Plaguebusters and this book, that you mostly just like wanted an excuse to work together.

Speaker 22 So I'm curious, like, what is the, what is it like for you guys to work together?

Speaker 21 Surprisingly harmonious, isn't it?

Speaker 25 Yeah, I think so.

Speaker 11 I mean, it's, again, you have a skill set that's different.

Speaker 24 But it seems to kind of slot together, doesn't it?

Speaker 11 Yeah, he also knows that there's this process I go through where everything's bad. I think the book is terrible.
It's It's horrible.

Speaker 11 We should just tell the publisher we're not going to do it because there's no way I'm going to put this out there. Like I, even with my adult nonfiction, like there's always like.

Speaker 21 Yeah, we have a couple of weeks of that. Yeah.
And then you get, we push through that and then you get to the other side and you're usually okay.

Speaker 11 You stay calm and you're like, well, maybe

Speaker 11 we can do this.

Speaker 11 that and it's just this it's you know i'm i'm a real perfectionist which actually being a perfectionist is is not a good thing to some extent because you know that famous um quote that art is never completed completed, just abandoned.

Speaker 11 Yeah, you know, it's you have to let go at some point and put it out into the world.

Speaker 11 And, you know, when we put out Plaguebusters, it was really funny because that cover to me really signaled this was a kid's book.

Speaker 11 But there were people who left reviews on Amazon that said, this isn't up to the snuff of Fitzharris's other books. And I was like, this is a kid's.

Speaker 11 How are people misunderstanding?

Speaker 21 I read it in like two hours and it was really.

Speaker 26 Yeah, it's a kid's book.

Speaker 18 I don't know what else to say.

Speaker 11 It was really funny like i i i said with this one i think they've done a better job on the amazon page of saying this is for readers aged eight to twelve right but um people yeah there was a lot of harumping you know you can imagine the kind of i'm sure you get that you know online they're the hump harumph harumfers right

Speaker 11 of a certain age who want to i think you're fine yeah if you look carefully at the kids

Speaker 11 and fitzharris is writing for the tick tock generation i'm like i'm writing for children i don't know what else to say. Like, the dancing scratch should have been the clue.
I don't know.

Speaker 25 But

Speaker 1 the well, actually, yeah.

Speaker 14 Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 25 It's frustrating.

Speaker 25 Yeah. The well.

Speaker 25 Yeah.

Speaker 11 Oh, I love the well actually.

Speaker 19 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, I absolutely love, you know, going back a little bit to the we're all weird kids who somehow ended up making a life of being weird and really thriving in that life.

Speaker 1 I think it's so incredible when people follow their curiosity, their interests, and turn it into a career path where they really end up getting to create something meaningful and meaningful and true to them, like the way that both of you have done.

Speaker 1 And I am wondering what advice you would give your younger selves or someone who maybe has a lot of passion for a particular subject, but doesn't quite know what to do with that.

Speaker 11 Don't do it.

Speaker 11 Now, you know, we always joke about the struggles of being freelancers, but in a weird way, this isn't what I do, it's who I am.

Speaker 11 And even when I was an academic and doing my PhD at Oxford, they couldn't really beat that creativity out of me.

Speaker 11 And recently, they asked me to come speak at Oxford, and I thought, oh, dear, you know, this is going to be interesting. And

Speaker 11 I got up and I gave a speech. And I started by saying that when I was a little girl, I wrote a letter to Stephen King, and I told him I wanted to be a writer just like him.

Speaker 11 And it turns out I didn't become become a novelist, but I do go around horrifying people with medical history. And there was a lot of nervous laughs amongst the Oxford dons.
And one of my very,

Speaker 11 the first professor I ever had in the history of science, Robert Fox, who's just an intellectual giant, he was there.

Speaker 11 And afterwards, he came up to me and a student came up and said, oh, you're so good at speaking. And he said, oh, yes, did you learn that at Oxford?

Speaker 21 And then Adrian said, no, I think she honed her skills on YouTube.

Speaker 11 And this old professor, I mean, he was like, YouTube, you know,

Speaker 25 really know what to say to that.

Speaker 11 But, you know,

Speaker 11 I now call myself a storyteller, first and foremost. And I am a medical historian.
I have a PhD and all of that.

Speaker 11 But it's really the stories and connecting with audiences who have maybe never thought about medical history as a subject, never even realized it was a subject. And that's where my passion is.

Speaker 11 And, you know,

Speaker 11 I think when

Speaker 11 genuinely passionate, you know, we live in an age of brands. You know, kids are obsessed with brands and how to build their own brand.

Speaker 11 And to some extent, I have built a brand as such, but it never started out that way. It was just a blog that I started called The Surgeon's Apprentice.

Speaker 11 It was supposed to really just be little stories that they wouldn't let me tell in academia that interested me and also to explain to people in my life what medical historians do.

Speaker 11 And it turns out that a lot of people really gravitated towards that that blog. And so, I think that my advice to anybody who's looking to do that is just always be genuinely passionate.

Speaker 11 If you are trying to sell something just because you have an end goal in mind, whether it's fame or a book deal or a podcast or a TV show,

Speaker 11 or money, it's never gonna work. And you have to be genuinely interested because audiences they can smell a fraud.
And, you know, this is why your podcast has done so well.

Speaker 11 You guys are genuinely passionate about this, this, you know, and that's what people gravitate toward. And you can't teach somebody how to do that.
You just have to.

Speaker 21 It's about being true to yourself as well. I mean, how often do you hear, you know, comedians or filmmakers or whatever?

Speaker 21 I mean, going back, we were talking about Monty Python briefly earlier on, you know, you ask any of them, they said, when we did that show, we were doing what we thought was funny.

Speaker 21 And all you can do is pursue that passion and hope that somebody else engages with it. And that's really all that it can do.

Speaker 21 I mean, that's not to say that for every success story, there aren't, you know, 500 people that didn't make it, but you have to be true to yourself.

Speaker 21 And as Lindsay said, you know, with what I do, you know, Lindsay says it's part of who she is. What I do is absolutely part of who I am.
And I can't imagine doing anything else.

Speaker 11 There's no retiring.

Speaker 21 It's not even, it sounds pretentious, you know, but it's not even like I have a choice. Right.

Speaker 21 It's who I am and it's what I do.

Speaker 11 I mean, your parents said that they put a pencil in your hand at the age of two and it was like 18 months.

Speaker 21 Yeah, 18 months. A light bulb went on.

Speaker 11 And so I think, you know, again, it's obviously there are real considerations. You do have to make money, you have to make a living, and those things have to be weighed.

Speaker 11 But it really, for me, you know, when I write my adult nonfiction, I always say, because I've just finished my next, my third book, which is going to be called Sleuth Hound, which is a guy about a guy named Joseph Bell, who was the real Sherlock Holmes, and it's about Victorian forensics.

Speaker 11 It's great fun.

Speaker 11 But so I'm now naturally thinking about what's the fourth book. And so I often live with the ghosts for a few months.

Speaker 11 There's a couple people rattling around in my head head who's going to tell the most compelling story. And

Speaker 11 that's what it comes down to.

Speaker 11 You can't, you know, sometimes people pick book subjects because they think it will make a great movie or they think it's, you know, going to fit into the political times.

Speaker 11 But if you artificially do that, it's never going to work.

Speaker 11 It has to be, even with Facemaker, when that came out, the Ukrainian war conflict started and people were naturally asking about the return of trench warfare.

Speaker 11 And we're seeing plastic surgeons going over there and volunteering to help rebuild people's faces, much like Harold Gillies did in the First World War. But that wasn't planned.

Speaker 11 And ultimately, people have to make those draw those conclusions themselves. Like, my job is to tell a really good story.
And whatever you do with that story is your business.

Speaker 11 Whether you think The Facemaker is a great anti-war book, or whether you think it's a great patriotic book that makes you proud of the people who fought, those are different agendas that the reader is going to bring to it.

Speaker 11 My job, I think, is to just tell the most compelling story I can.

Speaker 21 Ron.

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Speaker 1 Welcome back, everyone. We're here chatting with the wonderful Dr.
Lindsey Fitzharris and Adrienne Thiel about their book, Dead Ends. Let's get into some more questions.

Speaker 22 Back to the book, obviously, that we're here to talk about today, Dead Ends.

Speaker 22 And this kind of keeps coming up. It even came up in what you were just talking about.

Speaker 22 We've touched a lot on this idea and this concept that the book is mainly about, which is this, you know, failure is this stop point on the way to success.

Speaker 22 But the other big theme I feel like that emerges from this book, and you touched on it a little bit already too, is how the scientific process is this, you know, iterative process.

Speaker 22 And sometimes it goes quite fast, as we saw during COVID when things were changing so rapidly.

Speaker 20 But for a lot of history, it went very slowly.

Speaker 22 And you gave, I really loved the example of Galen that you gave in the book, who was, you know, this wise figure, had many failures and things that weren't right, but so many that were, that he was like really rarely ever questioned.

Speaker 22 And I know you mentioned, you know, chemotherapy as one of the things that you hope is going to change in the future.

Speaker 22 But what do you think, like more broadly, learning about the history of medicine can kind of teach us about the way that we think of medicine and medical advancements today?

Speaker 11 I think that's such a great question.

Speaker 11 And, you know, we, we actually just reread this book yesterday, which sounds odd, but, you know, we're a couple, I'm at least one book ahead because a book takes a long time in production.

Speaker 11 And so you have to kind of remind yourself of what the book was. And with this book, unlike my other adult books, there's a lot of stories.
It's not just one big narrative story.

Speaker 11 So I had to to kind of remind myself. But the story we were discussing between ourselves just this afternoon was the story of Phineas Gage, which a lot of Americans know.

Speaker 11 He was working on the railroad, tamping iron, and this iron rod shot through his skull, right through his brain, and he somehow survives. And his doctor starts to note changes in his behavior.

Speaker 11 And what's interesting is that happens in the early 19th century.

Speaker 11 And then in 1884, you have this guy named Daniel Ferrier who comes across Gage's story and starts to wonder if certain parts of the brain control certain functions. And he creates these brain maps.

Speaker 11 And the brain map is used to correctly identify a brain tumor in a patient named Henderson in 1884.

Speaker 11 So that's a long burn and it really hinged on on Farrier finding this kind of strange story that at the time wasn't very well known or very well publicized.

Speaker 11 And the only reason we really know about Phineas Gage is because of Farrier's brain maps.

Speaker 11 So I think it's important that kids realize, as you say, that the process can be very slow and not always a straight line.

Speaker 11 Sometimes there can be all kinds of things that happen in the middle that are wrong and then we get back on track.

Speaker 11 And a lot of times it also has to do with people being resistant to new ideas as well.

Speaker 21 Yeah, being entrenched in a position just because that's what people have always done, you know.

Speaker 19 Yeah.

Speaker 21 You know, he had a terrible influence.

Speaker 21 He was a very clever guy. He did some great stuff with, you know, cataract operations and such like, but he got as much wrong as he got right.
And

Speaker 21 his influence was to some extent quite detrimental for a lot of centuries, wasn't it?

Speaker 11 And actually, interestingly, with Gallen and the Four Humors, a lot of the reasons why people were bloodlet in the past was because there was this idea that they were producing too much blood.

Speaker 11 And this, even after Harvey, you know, proves the role of the heart in circulation, long, long after that, there was a photo that I sometimes post on social media from the early 20th century of someone being bled.

Speaker 11 And what was happening was older patients just felt like that's what you went to the doctor for. And so they were still requesting this.

Speaker 11 And sometimes doctors were doing it even though they knew it wasn't useful.

Speaker 11 And this is what I think today an akin thing would be antibiotics. A lot of people go in instantly ask for antibiotics.
That's not always appropriate. And now we're having antibiotic resistance.

Speaker 11 So it's not just on the medical community. It's also what we ourselves get used to.
In America, we're used to seeing a doctor in a white coat. Over here, I never see doctors in white coats.

Speaker 11 And I've been treated at the hospitals in London and they say, oh, no, no, no, no, not the white coats, those sleeves. You know, that can be very dirty.
And so there's a whole different culture.

Speaker 11 And so sometimes it takes generations to change those attitudes. And I always kind of revert back to Lister because he was my first love in the butchering art.

Speaker 11 But like Lister, really, the way he changes minds with germ theory is he goes to the younger generation and they become the Listerians, they become known as the Listerians.

Speaker 11 They go out and they spread the gospel of Lister. It's very showmanship.

Speaker 11 There's a processional aspect to what he's doing with the carbolic acid and sanitizing the surgical room. And that's how they ultimately change people's minds.
But it takes decades for this to happen.

Speaker 11 So it's really important that in the day and age where we want instant results and also where results in the the science and medical community often have to be justified by how much money it makes, we need to remember that research for the sake of research is really important, and that some of the biggest discoveries we've ever made were not goal-oriented in mind.

Speaker 21 I think another problem that doctors had in the past was you could come up with a paradigm shift, but the problem was getting the word out, wasn't it?

Speaker 21 I mean, now you've got you know, journal articles, websites, social media, you can get the message out.

Speaker 21 But in those days, it was more difficult i mean james lind who came up with a cure for scurvy you know you worked out that lemon juice he didn't know why lemon juice worked but he realized it did work you know that's fine but he was just like a small-time doctor that he wrote a book about it and a few people read it but that didn't mean that scurvy is automatically cured you know across the world so it it takes time and hard work and dedication to to keep pummeling away at these problems and and changing minds and getting the world the paradigm to actually shift you know and i was really looking forward to to you finding a way to bring scurvy into the conversation because i know they the errands love scurvy as well they've been huge huge fans of scurvy he loves scurvy and i he had to convince me to put it in plaguebusters because i was like scurvy like who cares about scurvy fantastic subject really is it really is it's a really important part of plaguebusters i agree

Speaker 11 oh yeah i know well he convinced me bench because i was like oh yeah a lot of people really did die of this it was such a weird it's it's such a weird one too because like your old wounds wounds open all this stuff.

Speaker 19 Yeah.

Speaker 1 I've been reading about nautical medical history for, we're doing an episode on necrotizing fasciitis, and there was a really interesting,

Speaker 20 yes, right?

Speaker 1 There was a really interesting book written, I think, in like 1808 or something like that.

Speaker 1 And they talk about like what one of the authors is in the discussion of these ulcers that are just like, you know, spread rapidly and end up killing the

Speaker 1 sailor. He's like, you know, and Lynn was talking about scurvy and how much of a problem he saw back in the day.

Speaker 1 And I'm amazed that he could find that many sailors with scurvy that I see no, like no sailors these days with scurvy. And I'm just like, to see that from...

Speaker 1 like that perspective, like he's already looking back like 200 years ago. And like, what was the concept then?

Speaker 1 How did they see the pattern of, you know, different transitions or these paradigm shifts?

Speaker 11 And I feel like scurvy, I mean, yeah, I know that story because I talk about it in the butchering art. Because doesn't it the ulcerating that it's in a guy's penis, if I were ever.

Speaker 1 The number of penis penises falling off, I have read several by this point. Like, I've just stumbled upon them, I have not sought them out, and yet they find me.

Speaker 20 They found you.

Speaker 21 Can I just say that Lindsay is surprisingly squeamish? Like, if you're watching a film and there's a gory bitch, yeah.

Speaker 23 Oh, I can't wait.

Speaker 1 I said, for God's sake, you write about people's penises falling off.

Speaker 25 I know.

Speaker 11 Well, it's funny because with the butchering art, I had, I went all over the world with it and I had three or four men faint. It was always men, by the way, who fainted

Speaker 11 while I gave that talk. And I think it was, it wasn't,

Speaker 11 it was the suggestion. You know, I think when people put themselves on the table or they put themselves in that position, it can get a little bit dicey.

Speaker 21 It's not, it's also, I think, if you describe it, I think the movie that you have going on in your head is worse than anything you can actually see in front of a brand.

Speaker 21 It's like Jaws with the shark, right? He couldn't show the shark, but he made the shark more scary by not showing the shark, you know?

Speaker 11 Yeah, so with movies today, yeah, it's always a little bit, you know, there's talk about adapting face maker.

Speaker 11 And, you know, I said, well, here, the challenge is you have to show the faces, you have to show the disfigured soldiers because we have to look at that. And, you know, but it's hard.

Speaker 11 And I think when you're empathetic, too, it can be, when you see it on film, it can be very difficult to sort of watch.

Speaker 11 But writing it doesn't feel quite as bad but I do remember the penis falling off and I remember I remember it because I remember the surgeon then saying like it was a big description and then it said he died like at the end like of course he died

Speaker 1 he died and then like the next line is this is not an uncommon story and I'm like what

Speaker 11 it's a horrible it's horrible like horrible you know you imagine then in these 19th century operating theaters it was just horrific

Speaker 1 I'm also very curious about the period of time that you are most interested in. You know, we talked about science being stubborn, and part of that is by design, of course.

Speaker 1 Like we can't, you know, completely change the field or rewrite the textbook based on one paper. We have to build that the body of evidence for that.

Speaker 1 But I feel like the 19th century is just ripe with these transformative moments where we have germ theory, we have sort of vaccines are starting to take off, we're finally having an understanding, I mean, evolution, all of these things are mixing together at once.

Speaker 1 And we might be a little bit too close to the 20th century to really see the same patterns. I'm not sure about that.
But I'm wondering what you love about the 19th century medicine.

Speaker 11 I, so this is funny because with Facemaker, it was a 20th century story.

Speaker 11 And I vowed to never return to the 20th century after writing it because there were things I hadn't anticipated, which I'm kind of embarrassed to say this as a historian, but I had just never ventured that close to modern times.

Speaker 11 But one of the problems was patient confidentiality. I had to prove that these men were dead.
And in cases where their stories had been told by Gillies in relation to their names, that was fine.

Speaker 11 It was part of the public record. But if I went into their patient records and found something that Gillies hadn't publicized, I couldn't put that to the patient's name in the story.

Speaker 11 So there were a lot of challenges to that. And also, as you say, you know, we are very close to it.

Speaker 11 I will meet people whose, you know, grandfather or great-grandfather was treated by Gillies, which is incredible to think.

Speaker 11 Actually, doctors are fascinating too, because medical history is sort of a genealogy. And I'll meet plastic surgeons who say, I was trained by somebody who was trained by Harold Gillies.

Speaker 11 And you think, oh, that can't be possible. But actually, you know.

Speaker 21 Well, it's funny you say that because my mentor, Roger Law, who created Spitting Image, he was taught by people who were taught by Henry Tonks. Yeah.

Speaker 21 It was the artist who did the sketches of the soldiers with the injured faces, you know, the medical for medical purposes.

Speaker 21 You know, it wasn't just an artistic exercise, it was actually to help Harold Giddes reconstruct faces.

Speaker 11 So it wasn't that long ago.

Speaker 21 It's only a couple of degrees of separation.

Speaker 11 Yeah, it wasn't that long ago. And so I always go back sort of the night at the night.
You know, I'm back into the 19th century with Sleuth Hound. It feels like a warm bath.
It's a world I know.

Speaker 11 And as you say, there's a lot of amazing things that are happening. Also, you don't have, you know, some of you things aren't in copyright.

Speaker 11 You know, you could go into the patient records without any problems. If you go back back further,

Speaker 11 the challenges that I find are that because I like to write narrative nonfiction for adults, that means it sort of reads like a novel, like in the style of Eric Larson.

Speaker 11 I don't have enough records necessarily to move some of those earlier figures around in a way that feels novelistic. Whereas with Lister, I have his diaries and letters and things like that.

Speaker 11 And so it's much easier.

Speaker 11 But, you know, with the children's book, we do deal a lot with the 19th century because there are just, you know, it's with with anesthesia it's humphrey davy starts experimenting with nitrous oxide and laughing gas in the sort of early 19th century and he does say something he wonders if this could be useful in surgery but it's not until 1844 until a dentist in america picks this up morton and and tries to use it to extract the tooth that they they think oh maybe this could be useful and then you get into ether being discovered and the guy who uses ether in america tries to patent it because that's the American way, and it sort of backfires on him.

Speaker 11 And so, there's all these like weird little failures in the story of anesthesia.

Speaker 11 But the biggest thing that comes out of anesthesia, which we talk about in dead ends, is actually there's this amazing triumph, but surgery becomes much more dangerous immediately after this moment because doctors are more willing to pick up the knife and to go deeper into the body, but they still don't understand germ theory.

Speaker 11 So, as a result, post-operative infection rises. So, again, you have this, this, this idea of success, but also can cause other problems.

Speaker 21 It's kind of two steps forward, one back, isn't it? Often?

Speaker 11 Yeah, and I think that's true even today. I'm sure, you know,

Speaker 11 here's another thing I just want to make clear is that, you know, we're very pro-science, pro-medicine.

Speaker 11 And one of the challenges with telling this story was to make sure we weren't scaring kids away from medicine and science.

Speaker 11 And, you know, one of the things we tried to do in the book was to remind them that we do now have regulations. We have the FDA, we have, you know, institutes that regulate this stuff.

Speaker 11 So it's a lot safer. You don't have Edward Jenner coming at you with the smallpox, you know, and hoping that this is going to work.

Speaker 11 So it's different in that sense. And we should celebrate those institutes that keep us safe.
And hopefully, we'll continue to do that.

Speaker 11 And that's a big part of the story. So it's, again, it's about not hiding our history.

Speaker 11 and acknowledging the harm that was done because I think also if we don't do that, it's not right to the people who were harmed by some of these experiments, but equally, you know, celebrating the triumphs and then seeing how we become better at what we do and safer at what we do and how this is, this is, is a better world because of what has happened.

Speaker 19 Yeah.

Speaker 19 Yeah.

Speaker 22 I feel like you highlight in the book too, a lot of how there has always been this misinformation and everything that is kind of everywhere as it is today.

Speaker 22 And so much of what drives misinformation and the spread of misinformation today is just this lack of a fundamental understanding in how science is actually done.

Speaker 22 And I feel like one of the things that's so great about the book is how you highlight that this is normal for things to change, how science is this work in process.

Speaker 22 We have to change our minds when we have conflicting evidence.

Speaker 22 What are some of the ways that you think today that for ourselves, our kids, our families, our friends, how can we like inoculate ourselves against this rise of medical misinformation?

Speaker 11 That's such a great question. And also,

Speaker 11 I just want to say that we don't just have medical misinformation, we now also have medical disinformation, which is different and purposely spread to misinform the public.

Speaker 11 And so it's a very scary thing.

Speaker 11 Having gone through breast cancer recently, there are some high-profile people who are just plainly saying things that are just not true about how you should be treating your breast cancer.

Speaker 11 And it can be very dangerous because people read this stuff, they're influenced by it. We live in the age of TikTok and influencers, and it can be very dangerous.

Speaker 11 Misinformation, you know,

Speaker 11 this is the issue is to go back to the COVID pandemic, was that it wasn't misinformation all the time when if we revised the advice.

Speaker 11 And so I think that's the problem is that people will sometimes look at it and think that, well, they were wrong.

Speaker 11 Well, they were wrong, but again, this is about the process of learning about the virus. When the virus was brand new, you know, there was different advice to two years later.

Speaker 11 And I think it is sort of a disconnect with the scientific process, the decline of science literacy, again, that we're seeing across the world.

Speaker 11 I don't know what the anecdote is though, because it's scary the way we consume information.

Speaker 11 One of the things we were talking about in a previous interview was that we did an event with Plaguebusters, and all the kids were sitting there reading, and they didn't care what we had to say, which was great to see.

Speaker 11 And I think the thing to take away was that kids actually are hungry for that kind of thoughtful content. They don't need to just be fed this through 30-second clips online.

Speaker 11 And in adults, too, they want the deep dives. You know, I'm still one of the dinosaurs on Instagram who are doing, you know, big-level Instagram posts.

Speaker 11 And people come to it and they want to read it and they want to understand more. And so I think that there's a value in books, there's a value in deep dives and we need to keep pushing that,

Speaker 11 you know, because that's the only way we're going to get over this sort of age of misinformation and disinformation. We have to be more literate and scientifically literate, certainly.

Speaker 19 Yeah.

Speaker 21 And, you know, a book's great because it gives you the space to do that, to make an argument, really.

Speaker 25 Yeah.

Speaker 21 I suppose what we're trying to do, isn't it?

Speaker 11 And make it fun for the kids. You know, you got the butthole butthole in there.

Speaker 18 You got the butthole in there.

Speaker 11 You got the fun illustrations. And it's just, it's been a joy to see kids pick this book up.
And I just hope that we can find ways to make science and medicine really fun for kids and

Speaker 11 find new ways to engage with them on these really interesting topics.

Speaker 1 I think that Dead Ends is, it's such an incredible book. It is something that as a kid, I would have loved.

Speaker 1 And I know that there are tons of nerdy kids out there and non-nerdy kids who are just gonna love this book and i just you know lindsay and adrian it has been such a joy to chat with you it's been a long time coming i feel like there's like a parasocial relationship thing going on where i'm like i know you this is amazing we're like we're friends already we're friends

Speaker 11 so i was just so happy that we could finally connect up and chat about this and i know that we'll be talking about sleuth hound and face maker and whatever else you guys want to talk about um because all the things yeah

Speaker 11 the fun um so thank you for for amplifying our book in this extraordinary way as well thank you

Speaker 1 A big thank you again to Lindsay and Adrian for taking the time to chat with us. us.
I am so glad that we finally got to have you all on the pod. What a delight.

Speaker 1 If you enjoyed today's episode and would like to learn more, check out our website, thispodcastwillkillYou.com, where I'll post a link to where you can find dead ends, flukes, flops, and failures that sparked medical marvels, as well as links to Lindsay's website and Adrian's website where you can find their other incredible work.

Speaker 1 And don't forget, you can check out our website for all sorts of other cool things, including, but not limited to, transcripts, quarantini, and placebo rita recipes, show notes and references for all of our episodes, links to merch, our bookshop.org affiliate page, our Goodreads list, a first-hand account form, and music by Bloodmobile.

Speaker 1 Speaking of which, thank you to Bloodmobile for providing the music for this episode and all of our episodes. Thank you to Liana Squolachi and Tom Breifogel for our audio mixing.

Speaker 1 And thanks to you listeners for listening. I hope you liked this episode and are loving being part of the TPWKY Book Club.
And a special thank you, as always, to our fantastic patrons.

Speaker 1 We appreciate your support so very much.

Speaker 1 Well, until next time, keep washing those hands.

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Speaker 12 Hey, audiobook lovers. I'm Cal Penn.

Speaker 13 I'm Ed Helms.

Speaker 12 Ed and I are inviting you to join the best-sounding book club you've ever heard with our new podcast, Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club.

Speaker 15 Each week, we sit down with your favorite iHeart podcast hosts and some very special guests to discuss the latest and greatest audio books from Audible.

Speaker 12 Listen to Iarsay on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow Iarsay and start listening on the free iHeart radio app today.

Speaker 1 As moms, we do everything we can to keep our kids safe. We babyproof the house, we buckle their seatbelts, we walk them to school.
But there's one danger we can't ignore.

Speaker 1 In the United States, the number one cause of death for school-aged children is gun violence. That's not just a statistic.
It's a wake-up call.

Speaker 1 That's why Every Everytown for Gun Safety Action Fund exists. We're a movement of nearly 11 million people, moms, teachers, survivors, and students working together to end gun violence.

Speaker 1 Through Moms Demand Action, we've built volunteer chapters in every state. We've helped pass hundreds of life-saving laws.
We've shown up at school board meetings, state houses, and the ballot box.

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If you've ever asked yourself, what can I do? Start here.

Speaker 1 Go to everytown.org and donate to day, because protecting our kids shouldn't stop at the front door. It starts with us.

Speaker 1 Make your donation today at everytown.org because together we can build a future free from gun violence.