The Occasional Human Sacrifice
Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No
Format:Hardback
Publisher:WW Norton & Co
Published:25th Jun '24
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For many years bioethicist Carl Elliott fought to expose a psychiatric research study at his own university in which an especially vulnerable patient lost his life. Elliott’s efforts alienated friends and colleagues and the university stonewalled him and denied wrongdoing until a state investigation finally vindicated his claims. This experience frames the six stories in this book of medical research in which patients allegedly gave their “consent” to participate 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 surgeons who blew the whistle in 2016 on lethal synthetic trachea transplants, Elliott tells the stories of insiders who spoke out against such abuses and often paid a terrible price for doing the right thing.
"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
ISBN: 9781324065500
Dimensions: 239mm x 160mm x 30mm
Weight: 552g
368 pages