The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No
Carl Elliott (Norton, $39.99, 355 pages)
Medical ethics professor Carl Elliott’s The Occasional Human Sacrifice is unlikely to engender greater trust in the medical profession as it explores six controversial cases in which medical researchers treated human beings as guinea pigs. Often the patients consented to the interventions, albeit without fully understanding what was occurring. From the Tuskegee syphilis experiments on black sharecroppers which began in the 1930s to the Willowbrook study in which researchers intentionally infected “mentally defective children” with hepatitis from in the 1960s, Elliott explains the medical research being done and the whistleblowers who exposed the supposed scandals. In Elliott’s telling, these are not always really scandals and the whistleblowers are often not really heroes. One case from the early 1960s involved patients at the Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital in Brooklyn being injected with live cancer cells, which was actually harmless. The whistleblower in this case had a personal beef with the doctor who did the research and was found to have made up details that were not true. Elliott himself once blew the whistle on his own university for research on a psychotic patient that he would later regret making public. His exploration of whistleblowers paints them mostly as cranks and malcontents even before they went public exposing alleged medical scandals; most of them had hard-left politics and colourful histories in radical movements. Elliott is less interested in the details of allegations of medical abuse and the resultant institutional cover-ups than he is the psychology of whistleblowers and what becomes of them and their exposure. Elliott says that sunlight is seldom enough to instigate change with most shifts in policy being accompanied by other developments and movements (Tuskegee and the civil rights movement). The last case Elliott explores was the lethal synthetic trachea transplants at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden in 2016, which resulted in five deaths, so he does not examine the experimental COVID jab.
