
Mr. Humble and Dr. Butcher
Monkey's Head, the Pope's Neuroscientist, and the Quest to Transplant the Soul
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Narrated by:
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Jean Ann Douglass
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By:
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Brandy Schillace
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.
©2021 Brandy Schillace. All rights reserved. (P)2021 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.Listeners also enjoyed...




















Critic reviews
“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 best-selling 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 best-selling author of Hidden Valley Road)
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What If?
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Excellent book and narration. The ending brings it all together perfectly.
Amazing!
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Great!
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Book about the history of surgeries and organ transplantations is, OF COURSE, filled with detailed descriptions of surgeries and transplantations. Many topics mentioned are revolving around the questions of morality, the border between life and death, tests on animals and other disturbing topics.
So, think about that before reading and do not pick up this book if you are not happy with these themes.
For the rest, I will seriously recommend it. It shows how fluid the border between life and death were just a few decades ago. It also shows how some operations have been perceived as sci-fi at first, a blasphemy later and routine nowadays.
Disturbing, yet that's the entire point
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Good book, goofy narrator...
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Moreover, the author's outright dismissal of the USA's history of experimentation on POC communities as Soviet propaganda beyond the days of slavery was disturbing and wildly inaccurate, while also someone trivializing experimentation on human beings as long as it was only on enslaved human beings.
I didn't just hate this book, I'm insulted by it. Shame on Brandy Schillace.
Thinly veiled anti-communist propaganda
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Animal cruelty.....
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struggle to finish this book
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