In medicine, whistleblowers face institutional denial, stonewalling, retaliation, and other kinds of reprisal.
“It's a demoralizing book,” Elliott tells me when I request an advanced copy, “but, well, that’s what the subject demanded.” It does. The scale of injury detailed in each chapter—coupled with extensive evidence from archives and local media—is as daunting as are the many efforts by institutions to deny error and responsibility.are the real victim—of a witch-hunt or smear campaign.
“I felt an antipathy against me,” one employee recalls after a well-considered decision to take his findings to the agency empowered to investigate them. “They feared I was opening my mouth too wide.” While revisiting some of medicine’s worst scandals—examples include four decades of intentionally untreated syphilis in hundreds of African-American men, a hepatitis experiment on dozens of intellectually disabled children, a years-long series of total body irradiation experiments involving the federal government, even a cover-up of egregious fraud at the same Swedish institute that awards the Nobel Prize in medicine—Elliott provides nuanced portraits of each whistleblower, including...