Meet the Author: Dr. Brandy Schillace

“Well-researched. Well-written. Suspenseful. Best of all, the book is fascinating.”— The Wall Street Journal

Shaker Library will host medical historian and critically-acclaimed author Brandy Schillace at 7 pm Wednesday evening June 2 via Zoom when she will discuss her newest book, Mr. Humble and Dr. Butcher: A Monkey's Head, the Pope's Neuroscientist, and the Quest to Transplant the Soul.

The book is the true story of the late Dr. Robert White, Shaker resident and MetroHealth’s first Chief of Neurosurgery, who tested the boundaries of science and ethics in his quest to transplant the human soul. The electronic book is available to download here from Overdrive or the physical book can be reserved here from the library.

Dr. Brandy Schillace is an engaging speaker who writes about culture, the history of medicine, and the intersections of medicine and literature. 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 at Case Western Reserve University.

She has spoken at universities around the country and has presented keynotes for the Institute for Medical Ethics in Oxford, UK, for the Association of Medical Humanities in Limerick, Ireland, at a roundtable for Cultural Crossing of Care in Oslo, Norway and at Senchenov University in Moscow.

Sign up here to meet Dr. Schillace online and learn more about Dr. Robert White—friend to two popes and a founder of the Vatican’s Commission on Bioethics—who developed lifesaving neurosurgical techniques and was nominated for the Nobel Prize. Meanwhile, 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.