Nate Pedersen

A rollicking visual and narrative history of popular ideas, phenomena, and widely held beliefs disproven by science. The Bermuda Triangle. Personality tests. Ghost hunting. Crop circles. Mayan Doomsday. What do all these have in common? None can quite live up to the rigour of actual facts or science, and yet they all attract passionate supporters anyway. Divided into broad sections...

From the masters of storytelling-meets-science and co-authors of Quackery, Patient Zero tells the long and fascinating history of disease outbreaks – how they start, how they spread, the science that lets us understand them, and how we race to destroy them before they destroy us. Written in the authors’ lively and accessible style, chapters include page-turning medical stories about a...

Journey back to a time when doctors tried to jolt your paralysed muscles awake with a strychnine-laced enema. When a physician wrote you a prescription for the mercury-based 'Thunderclapper' pill to relieve your constipation. When surgeons promised to improve your virility with goat-testicle implants. A tour of medicine’s most outlandish misfires, Quackery dives into 67 'treatments,' exploring their various uses...