The Occasional Human Sacrifice

“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

Carl Elliott is the author of Better than Well and White Coat, Black Hat: Adventures on the Dark Side of Medicine. He lives in Minnesota.