What happens
Dr. Patrick Corey, a scientist working in his laboratory, keeps the brain of a monkey alive by connecting it to a mechanical pump and an amplifier that lets its faint impulses be heard. His old friend Dr. Schratt and his son David are troubled by his work. After a fatal accident, Corey is called to operate on a wealthy man named Donovan, and he chooses to keep Donovan's brain alive outside the body. Orson Welles stars in this first half of Donovan's Brain, adapted from Curt Siodmak's novel and broadcast on The Mercury Theatre on the Air on May 18, 1944.
A laboratory in a small town, and later a psychiatric clinic, in the United States
Characters: Dr. Patrick Corey, Dr. Schratt, David, Janice, Donovan
Listen for: Corey's notes in his casebook and the steady pulse of the brain in its glass jar
Written from the episode itself; it never gives away the ending. Every recording is remastered for the stream: cleaned of rumble, hiss and mains hum (and the old TV whine where we found it), then levelled in two passes to steady broadcast loudness, so one show is never quieter than the next.