The Occasional Human Sacrifice
Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No
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- £12.99
Publisher Description
Shocking cases of abusive medical research and the whistleblowers who spoke out against them, sometimes at the expense of their careers.
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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Carl Elliott gives us the complete anatomy of a whistleblower in this fascinating non-fiction read. Elliott spent years trying to call attention to a psychiatric drug trial at the University of Minnesota that resulted in a young man’s suicide. So he decided to seek out others who have stood up against unethical human research to see what makes them tick. Whistleblowers from the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study (in which Black men with the infection were left intentionally untreated) and the disturbing Willowbrook experiment (in which children were purposely infected with hepatitis) are discussed, along with equally heinous studies we’d never even known about—wait until you read about the doctor performing tracheal replacements with a 0% success rate. Elliott is also open about how hard it is to speak out against the establishment, and the backlash that often follows. This is a damning look at what can happen to those who dare to do the right thing.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Medical research whistleblowers expose unethical studies for their own peace of mind, though doing so often leaves them feeling isolated and betrayed, according to this riveting study. Bioethicist Elliot (White Coat, Black Hat) digs into the whistleblower mindset by profiling six of them and reflecting on his own daunting experience exposing a psychiatric drug study that resulted in a research subject's suicide. His most notable interviewee is Peter Buxton, who blew the whistle on the notorious Tuskegee experiment, in which Black men with syphilis went untreated in a study designed to track the disease's progression. Despite spending seven years battling to end the experiment, Buxton goes unmentioned in most accounts, partly because of the unusual way he became involved—as a syphilis contact tracer in 1970s San Francisco, he stumbled upon Tuskegee almost by happenstance. Buxton stands out among Elliot's subjects for having come through emotionally unscathed—he is serene in his certainty that "Nazi medicine" must always be opposed, and thus that his only choice was to fight. But the same inevitability was a source of anguish for the others, who perceived themselves as hopelessly boxed in; whistleblowing was "the only choice they had." Detailing the extreme pressures to stay loyal that whistleblowers face, Elliott paints a damning portrait of the medical community's workplace culture. Readers will be outraged and enthralled.
