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. For many years Carl Elliott 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 programmes they did not understand, many of which had astonishing and well-concealed mortality rates. Elliott tells the extraordinary stories of insiders who spoke out against abuses and often paid a terrible price for doing the right thing.