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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
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English
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MR. HUMBLE AND DR. BUTCHER

Brandy Schillace

A Monkey’s Head, the Pope's Neuroscientist, and the Quest to Transplant a Soul

If you make a brain to live outside a body, what becomes of the self? This is the bizarre (but true) story about the world's first successful primate head transplant.
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 itselfworking 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 hopesand the long, strange journey from science fiction to science fact.


Dr. 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. She delivered a TEDx talk on Steampunk Science.
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Published 2021-03-02 by Simon & Schuster

Book

Published 2021-03-02 by Simon & Schuster

Comments

Schillace, editor of a British journal of medical humanities, 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.

Brilliant, disturbing, and fascinating. A true-life story even more dark and twisted than the X-Files case it inspired.

Well-researched. Well-written. Suspenseful. Best of all, the book is fascinating.

[Schillace] delivers a fascinating portrait of neurosurgeon Robert J. White.. her lyrical prose and psychological insights keep the pages turning... Readers will be riveted.

A rollicking, irresistible tale of doctors playing God, science facing off with ideology, and fate being sorely tempted at every turn.

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.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

Delightfully macabre.

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

[T]he captivating tale of Robert J. White... 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... [o]dd, engrossing science history capably related.

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.

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.

Masterful. A probing and provocative portrait.

ranking on Amazon: (March 23, 2021) #6 in Christian Popes #20 in Neuroscience (Books) #25 in History of Medicine (Books)