Mar 2: Book Launch at McNally Jackson

Join me for the launch of my latest book, MR. HUMBLE AND DR. BUTCHER! I’ll be giving a short author talk and Q&A with renowned science journalist Ed Yong at McNally Jackson. Details and RSVP below!

We will be presenting this event virtually, using Zoom. RSVP here.

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.

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.

Ed Yong is an award-winning science writer who reports for the Atlantic. His first book, I Contain Multitudes, about the amazing partnerships between microbes and animals, was published in August 2016. His writing has also appeared in National Geographic, the New Yorker, Wired, the New York Times, Nature, New Scientist, Scientific American, and more.