Mr. Humble & Dr. Butcher: A Monkey's Head, the Pope's Neuroscientist, and the Quest to Transplant the Soul

by Brandy Schillace

Overview

The “delightfully macabre” (The New York Times) true tale 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.

This “fascinating” (The Wall Street Journal), “provocative” (The Washington Post) tale follows his decades-long quest into tangled matters of science, Cold War politics, and faith, revealing the complex (and often murky) ethics of experimentation and remarkable innovations that today save patients from certain death. It’s a “masterful” (Science) look at our greatest fears and our greatest hopes—and the long, strange journey from science fiction to science fact.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781982113827
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	02/13/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	306
Sales rank:	551,634
File size:	25 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

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 host of the Peculiar Book Club, a livestream community for authors and their readers, she has appeared on the Travel Channel’s Mysteries at the Museum, NPR’s Here and Now, and FOX’s American Built. Dr. Schillace is a 2018 winner of the Arthur P. Sloan Science Foundation award and serves as editor-in-chief of BMJ’s Medical Humanities Journal.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Author's Note xi

Introduction: Meet the Resurrection Men 1

1 For Want of a Kidney 7

2 Two-headed dogs and the Space Race 31

3 What Do Dead Brains Think? 60

4 Brains behind the Iron Curtain (Or, Science, Vodka, and Pretty Girls) 84

5 Frankenstein's Monkey 103

6 The Modern Prometheus 127

7 The Human Animal 159

8 The Perfect Patient 192

9 What If We Don't Need the Spinal Cord? 222

Conclusion: Dr. Frankenstein's Reprise 247

Notes 259

Photo Credits 283

Index 285

Editorial Reviews

★ 01/11/2021

Medical historian Schillace (Death’s Summer Coat) 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 (the monkey survived for “almost nine days before the body rejected the head”) and dreamed of performing the same procedure for humans suffering from multiple organ failure. Schillace explores White’s deep Catholic faith and outsized ambitions (he ironically called himself “Humble Bob” ), and contextualizes his experiments with lucid discussions of the primitive state of American medicine in the 1950s and how Cold War tensions fueled an “inner space” race between U.S. and Soviet doctors to perform the first human head transplant. White’s determination to prove that “the mind could outlive the body” contributed to breakthroughs in brain cooling techniques for the treatment of spinal cord injuries and head trauma, Schillace notes, even as his experiments led to highly publicized showdowns with animal rights organizations. 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 by this story of how White tried “to stretch the limits of what science could do.” (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

Spirited and breezily provocative... White’s unorthodox quest made national news several times over the course of his long career, but in Mr. Humble and Dr. Butcher, Brandy Schillace finally gives it the thoughtful book-length treatment it deserves.”
— The Washington Post

“Engrossing. Schillace is a first-rate historian with the perceptive eye of a storyteller.”
— 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

“Well-researched. Well-written. Suspenseful. Best of all, the book is fascinating.”
— The Wall Street Journal

“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

“Brilliant, disturbing, and fascinating. A true-life story even more dark and twisted than the X-Files case it inspired.”
— Frank Spotnitz, Golden Globe-winning writer and producer of The X-Files

“Lively and sometimes horrifying... A fascinating and disturbing look at the complicated world of medical research and one of its most extreme practitioners.”
— The Columbus Dispatch

“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.

“Delightfully macabre.”
— The New York Times

“I cannot recommend this book highly enough.”
— Ed Yong, New York Times bestselling author of I Contain Multitudes

“Masterful. A probing and provocative portrait.”
— Science

From the Publisher

★ 03/01/2021

The mid-20th century brought about great strides in organ transplantation. Robert White, fresh from the U.S. Army Medical Corps toward the end of World War II, was a surgical resident at Peter Brent Brigham Hospital in Boston when the first successful kidney transplant was conducted there. As Schillace (Death's Summer Coat) explains in this readable account, White was a dedicated neurosurgeon, working late into the night after his surgeries were done for the day and often bringing lab mice and monkeys home to keep a close eye on them. He was also a devoted husband and father and a devout Catholic, who founded Pope John Paul II's Committee on Bioethics and belonged to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. Schillace expertly narrates White's exploration of the intersection of faith and science, and his determination to find a way to transplant the human soul. Ultimately, White became known for performing head transplants on living monkeys, giving himself the nickname Humble Bob while animal rights activists and skeptics referred to him as Dr. Butcher. VERDICT Schillace brings her expertise as a medical historian to this carefully researched, pioneering biography of an eccentric doctor. A compelling read that will draw in variety of readers.—Marcia G. Welsh, formerly with Dartmouth Coll. Lib., Hanover, NH

Library Journal

2020-11-26
A story about medicine, morals, religion, and human head transplants.

Schillace, editor-in-chief of the academic journal Medical Humanities, has a knack for writing about intriguing, offbeat topics, and her third book, she admits, is “perhaps the strangest story I have ever encountered.” The author tells the captivating tale of Robert J. White (1926-2010), a brilliant “doctor with two selves, two impulses, and even two names,” who was obsessed with transplanting organs. White, who referred to himself as “Humble Bob,” came from a middle-class, devout Catholic background, and he would serve as a bioethics adviser to Pope John Paul II. In medical school, he developed an interest in the brain’s physiology, writing that the organ is the “physical repository for the soul.” In the 1950s, inspired by a Russian physiologist’s grotesque creation of a living, two-headed dog, White began experimenting with hemispherectomies of dogs, keeping the brain alive using pioneering hypothermic cold. A new position in neurosurgery provided White with a platform for his research. Considering his work, the author ponders “what it would mean to be a brain, alive but bodiless.” With ease, she explains in detail White’s complex medical research and procedures, many of which would have substantial real-world applications. In 1963, White successfully removed a monkey’s brain and hooked it up to a “laboratory cyborg” of a donor monkey and a machine White had designed. Still, writes Schillace, “he needed to prove that consciousness could be transplanted.” A 1967 article about White’s surgeries by journalist Oriana Fallaci resulted in outrage from animal rights activists, a surge in brain death debates, and a nickname: Dr. Butcher. In 1970, White successfully completed a brain transplant, inserting one monkey’s brain into another monkey’s head; it lived for nine days. Swirling around inside this absorbing biography are Schillace’s thoughtful discussions of the knotty issues involved in medical and religious ethics. At times Frankenstein-esque, it’s unquestionably a “strange journey from science fiction to science fact.”

Odd, engrossing science history capably related.

Kirkus Reviews