The History of Head Transplants

Dan Snow's History Hit

History Hit

History

4.7 • 12.9K Ratings

🗓️ 7 June 2021

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The superpower rivalry of the Cold War had many different fronts, space, the rice paddy fields of south-east Asia and even the operating theatre. The desire to push the envelope of human ingenuity led Dr Robert J. White to conduct a series of successful head transplants on monkies during the 1970s with the eventual aim of performing the procedure on a human patient. Dr Brandy Schillace, the author of Mr Humble and Dr Butcher, is today's guest on the podcast and she tells the almost unbelievable story of how close we came to seeing human head transplants take place.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	I've really welcomed Danston's history. Every sort in a book comes across my desk, which
0:05.2	blows my little mind. In fact, I've been quite a lot because there's one of the stories
0:08.8	out there, and humans, we've provided a lot of mind-blowing material over the last few
0:12.4	millennia. Let me tell you. A none, none more so than this. This is a story of successful,
0:20.6	head transplants. I'm not joking. This has happened, not to a human, but to one of our
0:27.6	near relatives. It's unbelievable. Dr. Brandy Skillachi is a brilliant historian. She writes about
0:34.8	the history of medicine, where medicine and literature overlap. And she has written an astonishing
0:40.1	new book, the central character of it being this guy, Dr. White, who basically discovered that you
0:46.0	could keep a human brain working by attaching the head in which that brain is to another body.
0:52.4	I'm serious. It's unbelievable. You're going to struggle, struggle to maintain fragility as
0:57.7	you listen to this podcast, but it is real. History, folks, all the most amazing stories are true.
1:02.7	So let's go reading no fantasy novels. No TV shows about dystopian semi-foodle societies that
1:09.9	use dragons in combat here. No, no, no. You can get your mind blown by engaging with things that
1:15.5	have actually happened. Speak of mind-blowing things. My team at History Yet, because it's
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1:30.0	You get to watch my new show on D-Day, in which we uncover a shipwreck on the south coast of
1:34.4	England that is in fact a landing craft from D-Day. You get to go and watch that, and you get to do it
1:39.6	all, folks, or 50% of your first six months. It's crazy. My marketing mansion is a head transplant.
1:46.5	Don't be listening to this paddy, because it's better work. Anyway, 50% of your first six months
1:53.1	if you use the code D-Day, D-Day, A-Y, if you've ever won't be using history at.tv.
1:58.6	Now my friends, now is the time to go and check it out. In the meantime though, here is Dr.
	...

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