5 Books that Influenced My Writing
Or: How to find inspiration for a book about Cold War head transplants and disembodied brains
It’s not everyday you have a bloody notebook dumped in your lap. (At least, I hope not.) That’s essentially how my most recent book got its start — a phone call from a neurosurgeon pal, a visit to his office, and a creepy old lab notebook crammed with details about how to decapitate things, complete with rusty flecks of ... well. You get the idea.
The dog-eared binder had belonged to Dr. Robert White, a Nobel prize-nominated neurosurgeon-scientist who invented brain cooling perfusion, was friends with Pope John Paul II, and transplanted monkey heads onto different bodies. Does that sound like science fiction? It probably should — but my research ultimately took me on a far stranger journey of fact. The resulting book covers 50 years of transplant surgery, civil rights, animal rights, brain death, and the Cold War race between the US and USSR to be first at transplanting a head. Perhaps most importantly, the book asks questions about the nature of life and death. The line between a living brain and a dead body can be surprisingly murky; where are the limits of science — and who gets to decide?
My book has the curious title of Mr. Humble and Dr. Butcher: A Monkey’s Head, the Pope’s Neuroscientist, and the Quest to Transplant the Soul. I was influenced by a lot of wild history, but all books are natural siblings — and mine was shaped by five incredible works (some of which may surprise you!).
Okay, maybe this one isn’t that surprising. It’s not nonfiction, but it was one of Dr. Robert White’s favorite books! The novel’s titular character, Victor Frankenstein, related the tangled web of horror and fate that caused him first to build his “monster,” and later to abandon it, to the destruction of his life and family. Most people see this as a cautionary tale; science should not play God! Dr. White saw it very differently. He felt Victor was a hero, pushing the boundaries of scientific discovery. But he would feel that way, wouldn’t he?
2. The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons, by Sam Kean
There are two reasons for including this book. The first is Sam Kean’s relatable style. I admire and emulate that; the story of Dr. White comes at you fast. It sometimes feels like an adventure story, or even a fictional tale, with the hero performing miraculous medical feats as well as dastardly experiments — both at home, and in Moscow. Kean’s book likewise takes you on a madcap tour of weird scientific tales (including “alien hand syndrome,” wherein a patient with half their brain removed suddenly finds one of their hands has rebelled to become an enemy!) Brain science is complex, but that doesn’t mean it must be hard to understand — like Kean, I bring the everyday reader into a realm of strange neurological facts, but you always have both feet on the ground (and your fingers rapidly turning the pages).
3. Soul Made Flesh, by Carl Zimmer
Ok, any book by Carl Zimmer would do; in fact, his most recent Life’s Edge has a lot in common with mine (including date of appearance — we both launched March 2021). In Soul Made Flesh, Zimmer reminds us that the mind/brain/think-therefore-I-am connection is fairly recent. For centuries, we mostly thought of the gray goo between our ears as uninteresting jelly. And, if you scoop it out onto a table, it does tend to go flabby and flat pretty quickly. The brain, as we understand it, was “discovered” by Thomas Willis in the 17th century, setting science on course for a neurocentric future. Robert White didn’t discover the brain, but instead proved just how much we still don’t know about it. “I’m an astronaut,” White once said, out to discover “inner” space.
4. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson
“With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to the truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
What if Dr. Jekyll had it right? What if man, with his highly evolved brain attached to its frequently disobedient body and all its wants and cares, isn’t one being, but two? Where does brain end and body begin? How many selves do we have and where does “self” reside? In the end, this is less a Frankenstein story, and more the tale of Jekyll and Hyde. White was both a surgeon and a scientist, a Catholic father of ten and a man who blithely too the heads off of living creatures (and wanted to do so with human beings). You might say, like Jekyll, he had two selves, two impulses, and even two names. White, the staunch defender of ethics, a good Catholic, and friend of the Pope liked to refer to himself (rather ironically) as Humble Bob. His detractors, including activists for the ethical treatment of animals, called him Dr. Butcher, and laid at his door the unnecessary suffering of countless creatures and a fearful ambition. I’ll leave it to the reader to determine which nature wins out in the end.
5. Stiff: The Curious Life of Human Cadavers, by Mary Roach
This list would not be complete without mention of Mary Roach and a nod, also, to Lindsey Fitzharris, author of The Butchering Art. Both of these authors captured something — a reader’s desire for the peculiar, the odd, even the macabre. Mary does this with disarming humor; I mean, how else would you get through a book about corpse crash test dummies and the rate of rot at body farms? And yet, it is readable, even lovable, and she has a base of excited fans who read and re-read her work. Lindsey’s is more gruesome, but is also a narrative about a single man’s work and the progress of science. Neither shy away from the weird, the gross, the difficult. And I was inspired and impacted by this, because Dr. White’s story is at times deeply unsettling. Transplant science raised fears during the civil rights movement that Black bodies would be harvested to save White lives (and the second heart transplant was, in fact, from a Black man in apartheid South Africa to a White heart disease patient). Then there are the animal rights to consider; is it okay to do experiments on dogs? monkeys? If so, what makes it ok and where do we draw the line? And there is Dr. White himself, at once saint and sinner, a surgeon who saved lives and a scientist who ended them. The book delves into all of these issues, even the ugly ones, to answer questions about the limits of what science could do — and what it should do.
I owe a debt to all of these books (and more!) I hope you’ll enjoy mine — and check our these inspiring works of fiction and non-fiction as well!
