Carl Elliott

“Beneath the white coats and sterile labs of the great American heath care system, Carl Elliott finds a drug-addled, gang-run, con game—sometimes bizarre, often hilarious. The noble arc that runs from Hippocrates to Sherwin Nuland washes out in a 'business model' apparently inspired by Timothy Leary, John Gotti and that infomercial pitch guy for ShamWow.” --Jack Hitt, contributing editor for This American Life and author of Off the Road.

Adventures on the Dark Side of Medicine

White Coat, Black Hat

By New Yorker and Atlantic writer Carl Elliott, a readable and even funny account of the serious business of medicine. A tongue-in-cheek account of the changes that have transformed medicine into big business. Physician and medical ethicist Carl Elliott tracks the new world of commercialized medicine from start to finish, introducing the professional guinea pigs, ghostwriters, thought leaders, drug reps, public relations pros, and even medical ethicists who use medicine for (sometimes huge) financial gain. Along the way, he uncovers the cost to patients lost in a health-care universe centered around consumerism.

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.

Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No

The Occasional Human Sacrifice

An examination of "enhancement technologies" in America considers the pervasiveness of self-improvement drugs and procedures in spite of society's general unease about their use, considering the reasons why people obsessively pursue self-happiness through conformist methods. Reprint. 13,000 first printing.

Better Than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream

"Elliott's absorbing account will make readers think again about the ways that science shapes our personal identities."—American Scientist Americans have always been the world's most anxiously enthusiastic consumers of "enhancement technologies." Prozac, Viagra, and Botox injections are only the latest manifestations of a familiar pattern: enthusiastic adoption, public hand-wringing, an occasional congressional hearing, and calls for self-reliance. In a brilliant diagnosis of our reactions to self-improvement technologies, Carl Elliott asks questions that illuminate deep currents in the American character: Why do we feel uneasy about these drugs, procedures, and therapies even while we embrace them? Where do we draw the line between self and society? Why do we seek self-realization in ways so heavily influenced by cultural conformity?

Life is hard in the Beardsley Terrace housing projects of Bridgeport, Connecticut, and seventeen-year-old Jesse Westbrook has built a dangerous reputation for himself by necessity. His family offers a calming, supportive environment, even if his stepfather has questionable mob connections. However, Jesse's life soon takes a tragic turn when his mother and stepfather are brutally murdered on the orders of Eddie DeLuca, a mobster who doubles as Bridgeport's police chief. Vowing to exact revenge, Jesse becomes a feared presence on the streets, dealing heroin until an overdose robs him of his main girl. Enlisting in the army, the young man fights in Vietnam, where he makes an important discovery: he enjoys killing. Now Jesse's back in the projects, running a feared street gang and tangling with the mob, rival gangs, and the cops. It's only a matter of time before Jesse comes to the attention of Eddie DeLuca, now Bridgeport's mayor. A confrontation between mob boss and gang leader is brewing, and only one of them will make it out alive. It's up to Jesse to make sure DeLuca is the one who ends up in the morgue-or what's left of him.

Carl Elliott

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