A Monkey's Head, the Pope's Neuroscientist, and the Quest to Transplant the Soul
by Brandy Schillace
Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Mar 2021
320 pages
Genre: Biography/Memoir
Publication Information
The mesmerizing biography of a brilliant and eccentric surgeon and his quest to transplant the human soul.
In the early days of the Cold War, a spirit of desperate scientific rivalry birthed a different kind of space race: not the race to outer space that we all know, but a race to master the inner space of the human body. While surgeons on either side of the Iron Curtain competed to become the first to transplant organs like the kidney and heart, a young American neurosurgeon had an even more ambitious thought: Why not transplant the brain?
Dr. Robert White was a friend to two popes and a founder of the Vatican's Commission on Bioethics. He developed lifesaving neurosurgical techniques still used in hospitals today and was nominated for the Nobel Prize. But like Dr. Jekyll before him, Dr. White had another identity. In his lab, he was waging a battle against the limits of science, and against mortality itself—working to perfect a surgery that would allow the soul to live on after the human body had died.
Mr. Humble and Dr. Butcher follows his decades-long quest into tangled matters of science, global politics, and faith, revealing the complex (and often murky) ethics of experimentation and remarkable innovations that today save patients from certain death. It's an enthralling tale that offers a window into our greatest fears and our greatest hopes—and the long, strange journey from science fiction to science fact.
"Medical historian Schillace delivers a fascinating portrait of neurosurgeon Robert J. White (1926–2017), who performed the first transplant of one monkey's head onto another's body in 1970...Schillace explains the medical nuances of White's surgeries without too much gruesome detail, and her lyrical prose and psychological insights keep the pages turning. Readers will be riveted." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Schillace...has a knack for writing about intriguing, offbeat topics...Swirling around inside this absorbing biography are Schillace's thoughtful discussions of the knotty issues involved in medical and religious ethics...Odd, engrossing science history capably related." - Kirkus Reviews
"Science at its weirdest...[Schillace] artfully addresses such ethical issues as animal rights, how we define death, and playing God in the laboratory. In her unnerving chronicle of neuroscience experimentation, she also ponders notions of self and soul, hubris and horror." - Booklist
"Brandy Schillace has taken a most bizarre and ethically complex episode in the history of medicine and crafted from it a narrative that is nuanced, informed, and almost impossible to stop reading. I swear to you, if you have a brain inside your head (or anywhere else), you will find this book fascinating." - Mary Roach, New York Times bestselling author of Stiff
"Engrossing. Schillace is a first-rate historian with the perceptive eye of a storyteller." - Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris, New York Times bestselling author of The Butchering Art
"A rollicking, irresistible tale of doctors playing God, science facing off with ideology, and fate being sorely tempted at every turn." - Robert Kolker, New York Times bestselling author of Hidden Valley Road
"A riveting, heartfelt page-turner. Schillace reveals Dr. Robert White in all his strange, complicated brilliance: a pious, ambitious, egotistical innovator who was willing to challenge almost any norm—including the definition of life itself—in his quest to develop a mind-bending and potentially world-changing new surgical procedure." - Luke Dittrich, New York Times bestselling author of Patient H.M.
This information about Mr. Humble and Dr. Butcher was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Brandy Schillace is a historian of medicine and the critically acclaimed author of Death's Summer Coat: What Death and Dying Teach Us About Life and Living and Clockwork Futures: The Science of Steampunk. The editor-in-chief of the journal Medical Humanities, she previously worked as a professor of literature and in research and public engagement at the Dittrick Medical History Center and Museum.
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