Doctor Butcher: crank, genius or son of Frankenstein?

I hated reading this book. Not only was it objectively upsetting, as any book describing monkey vivisection would be (I put my head in my hands when I realised there were photographs), it was also dispiriting, because it showed up my hypocrisy. Like so many, I would gratefully accept perfusion brain-cooling techniques if they helped me survive surgery, yet I do not wish to read about how these techniques were developed on primates. It would be enough for me just to know that their suffering was minimised. This book asks even more of its reader, by focusing on gruelling experiments that lead nowhere.

Its cover is a little misleading, with engravings hinting at the period of Burke and Hare, when in fact the book centres on the Cold War, and the animal sacrifice is brutally 20th century. It is well written, in that the author can speak clearly to a layperson and engage a reluctant, even repulsed reader. Brandy Schillace ably and provocatively traces the career of Dr Robert White, a gifted US neurosurgeon who advanced medical science but also spent much of his career on what turned out to be a canard: preparing to effect the first human brain transplant.

Schillace leads us up to the point, in 1999, when it seemed about to happen. White, already turned down by Stephen Hawking, wished to help a paralysed man, Craig Vetovitz (who, as a youth, had dived into a pool head-first from too high — breaking the water with his hands would have saved his vertebrae). Vetovitz had forged a good life for himself, but his kidneys were giving up and White was going to swap his head on to a ‘brain-dead’ donor body. White practised the operation on two human cadavers — then failed to proceed, retired out of his post.