Professor Carl Elliott’s new book The Occasional Human Sacrifice, is about whistleblowers in medicine. In this episode, we discuss the whistleblowers at Willowbrook, a residential institution for autistic and developmentally disabled people that was exposed for human rights abuses in 1972. We also talk about the experience of being a whistleblower and its impact on mental health, as well as strategies for reporters and whistleblowers.
Listen to the podcast by playing the audio file below, or on streaming sites like Spotify, ApplePodcasts, Pandora, etc
Read the transcript, below the audio.
Cw for institution survivors: Abuses in residential institutions discussed at 5:30-11:05 and 32:45-37:03
Transcript: Transcript_Carl Elliott_Noncompliant Podcast
Bio
Carl Elliott is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota. He’s a native of Clover, South Carolina, where his father was a family doctor and his mother was a librarian. Before moving to Minnesota, he taught at McGill University in Montreal. Among the awards he has received for his work are a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Award, and the Maguire Chair in Ethics and American History at the US Library of Congress.
Resources
The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No, by Carl Elliott (W W Norton)
Former residents of Willowbrook recall its horrors as fight for disability rights continues. Times Union. March 27, 2023.
Willowbrook State School. Wikipedia.
Stop the Shock at Judge Rotenberg Center: Action Alerts. Autistic Self Advocacy Network (US).