Mr. Humble and Dr. Butcher

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

By: Brandy Schillace

Narrated by: Jean Ann Douglass

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.

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 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

What If?

I enjoyed the book! it was a fascinating story that makes you think what if?

Amazing!

It really is a shame that ethics and human sensibilities have held back the research to make the "White Surgery" a reality. Maybe one day soon...

Excellent book and narration. The ending brings it all together perfectly.

Great!

This is a great book. Intelligently written. I enjoyed this book very much. Thank you

Disturbing, yet that's the entire point

I have no idea what people criticizing this book for being too graphic or triggering have in mind.

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.

Good book, goofy narrator...

Narrator reads slow, pauses too long, and mispronounces Macaque for half the book before switching it up and getting it right.

Thinly veiled anti-communist propaganda

I was incredibly excited by the science of this book, but once we arrived at discussing the contributions of the USSR, science went out the window for politics. We heard more about the poor quality of Soviet souvenirs than we did about their contributions to medical science, and what contributions WERE discussed were trivialized or framed as mad scientist insanity - even when it very closely mirrored what was being done in the US.

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.

Animal cruelty.....

Unless you like hearing about really awful experiments done on dogs, I'd steer clear. Really awful subject matter. I tapped out 90 minutes in.

struggle to finish this book

when I first picked up the book I thought I was really excited to read it. however it has deemed itself to be extremely and graphically gory. not my cup of tea or my kind of book.