Overview

The Occasional Human Sacrifice is an intellectual inquiry into the moral struggle that whistleblowers face, and why it is not the kind of struggle that most people imagine. Carl Elliott is a bioethicist at the University of Minnesota who was trained in medicine as well as philosophy. For many years he fought for an external inquiry into a psychiatric research study at his own university in which an especially vulnerable patient lost his life. Elliott's efforts alienated friends and colleagues. The university stonewalled him and denied wrongdoing until a state investigation finally vindicated his claims. His experience frames the six stories in this book of medical research in which patients were deceived into participating in experimental programs they did not understand, many of which had astonishing and well-concealed mortality rates. Beginning with the public health worker who exposed the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and ending with the four physicians who in 2016 blew the whistle on lethal synthetic trachea transplants at the Karolinska Institute, Elliott tells the extraordinary stories of insiders who spoke out against such abuses, and often paid a terrible price for doing the right thing.

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9781324116837

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Reviews

""Elliot doesn't end with answers to the questions of why people become whistleblowers, but that's the beauty not the failure of his book. He may not have provided the neat answers that might arise from a survey of 150 whistleblowers, but he has provided much richer, more complex, and more convincing answers than arise from such surveys."" -- Richard Smith - British Medical Journal ""...The Occasional Human Sacrifice is a must read for everyone who cares about principles and doing right, but especially for bioethicists, IRB committee members, and others interested in human experimentation gone awry, and the price some pay to shed light on the malfeasance and injustices therein."" -- J Wesley Boyd - International Journal of Medical Education ""The Occasional Human Sacrifice looks at some of the most infamous research scandals of the last hundred years from the perspectives of the whistle-blowers who exposed them… what emerges from the book is a hair-raising sense of contingency: that without the efforts of whistle-blowers, such atrocities could easily have continued."" -- Jack Goulder - Literary Review ""Part oral history, part ethnography, part autobiography, this book is as much a study of the unusual character of whistleblowers as it is a study of the pathologies of power that repeatedly encourage biomedical institutions to close ranks against them… The Occasional Human Sacrifice provides a crucial context otherwise absent from the histories medical professionals tell ourselves of how we became bioethical."" -- Jeremy Greene - The Lancet ""Elliott has a reporter’s eye for expressive details, and his matter-of-fact approach is an effective way to write about stories that shock the conscience."" -- Seth Mnookin - The Atlantic

Author Information

Carl Elliott is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Award, he is the author of Better Than Well and White Coat, Black Hat. He lives in Minnesota.

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