ON SALE MAY 14, 2024

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.

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.

Carl Elliott is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota. He grew up in Clover, South Carolina, where his father was a family doctor and his mother was a librarian. He attended Davidson College, the Medical University of South Carolina and Glasgow University in Scotland…read more

Praise for The Occasional Human Sacrifice

  • "Meticulous and compelling….I was unable to stop reading this astonishing book’s riveting accounts of the paradoxes inherent in assuming the role, action, and devastating punishments accruing to medical whistleblower."

    ― Harriet Washington, author of Medical Apartheid

  • “Fascinating….A disturbingly eye-opening read.”

    ― Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  • A brilliant, harrowing book: part medical investigation, part memoir, part searing portrait of human behavior— from systematic cruelty to near-obsessive moral codes. Carl Elliott has written a page-turner that manages to be both cynical and deeply compassionate. Urgent, unforgettable, and beautifully written.

    ― Julie Schumacher, author of Dear Committee Members and The Shakespeare Requirement

  • "Carl Elliott, one of America's most important and humane voices calling out medical corruption, goes deep in The Occasional Human Sacrifice. It's not only about research that amounts to human torture, or even taking on some of the marquee institutions in science. This important book explores how corruption in any realm germinates and why people blow the whistle despite the price they pay."

    ― Brian Alexander, author of Glass House and The Hospital

  • "What reads at first like a sly crash course on Nicomachean ethics quickly reveals itself as a rip snorting thriller about lone-wolf whistleblowers who’ve peeked inside America’s elegant, well-funded human-trial labs to find a bloody, nearly Aztecan barbarism."

    ― Jack Hitt, author of Off the Road and Bunch of Amateurs

  • “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…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.”

    –Publishers’ Weekly (★ Starred Review)

 

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