Originally published in The American Conservative.

The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No
by Carl Elliott
W.W. Norton, 368 pages

If I told you that doctors had injected live cancer cells into elderly Jewish patients, including Holocaust survivors, without their consent for experimental purposes, you would be appalled. That was certainly the public’s reaction when the scandal at Brooklyn’s Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital was uncovered in 1964. But digging deeper into the facts reveals that the experiment was far more benign than it sounds. Quite a few medical “scandals” are like that.

The injections, believe it or not, were harmless. There was no chance of getting cancer from them. It had long been medically established that the foreign cancer cells from such an injection would be rejected painlessly by a patient’s body, with a lump forming and then healing over the course of weeks. The point of the experiment was to evaluate the sick patients’ immune responses, to see if it took longer than usual for these sick patients to reject the foreign cells. Oral consent was obtained from each individual. The word “cancer” was not used, but the patients were told, accurately, that “an injection of a cell suspension was planned as a skin test for immunity.”

Medical whistleblowers are the subject of a new book by medical ethics professor Carl Elliott, The Occasional Human Sacrifice. The impression left by the book is that most whistleblowers, far from being heroic, are troublemaking narcissists with their own private motives. In the case of the Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital, the whistleblowing doctor was known to have “a personal animus” against one of his colleagues whom he wanted to get fired. He also fabricated details, such as that patients were too senile to give consent or suffered intense pain from the experiment, allegations that other witnesses claimed were totally false.

Read the rest at The American Conservative.