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

A “delightfully macabre” (The New York Times) Cold War medical history about 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 hea...