Carl Elliott

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.

For many years bioethicist Carl Elliott fought to expose a psychiatric research study at his own university in which an especially vulnerable patient lost his life. Elliott’s efforts alienated friends and colleagues and the university stonewalled him and denied wrongdoing until a state investigation finally vindicated his claims. This experience frames the six stories in this book of medical research in which patients allegedly gave their “consent” to participate 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 surgeons who blew the whistle in 2016 on lethal synthetic trachea transplants, Elliott tells the stories of insiders who spoke out against such abuses and often paid a terrible price for doing the right thing.

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.

Yellow Mill River is a 40 year saga about the rise and fall of an African-American Crime Family headed by a man named, Maurice "Mo" Lomax. At the age of 15, young Mo is forced to leave Alabama and move to the Yellow Mill Village Projects in the Industrial City of Bridgeport, Connecticut. As a youngster, Mo meets and befriends a young "Bootlegger" by the name of Guy Lee. Together, the two young men get involved with and soon work for the Italian Mafia. Once Mo is given carte blanche treatment for killing a rival mobster, he soon starts his own "Crew". As the years pass, Yellow Mill Village is renamed, "Father Panik Village" and not only do Mo and Guy get their friends involved, they also bring in numerous relatives including their offspring who help launch the family into the drug business. This Novel is a fictional account of how Drugs and violence have lined the pockets of it's hustlers as well as brought tragedy to many of America's families.

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?

This deeply moving story chronicles the tenacity and vision that carried Carl Elliott from the hills of northwest Alabama to eight distinguished terms in the United States House of Representatives. Born in a log cabin on a tenant farm in 1913, Carl Elliott worked his way through The University of Alabama during the Great Depression and was elected to Congress in 1948. With a no-nonsense philosophy of fairness and equal opportunity, he established himself as one of the most effective members of the House of Representatives during the 1950s. He was a progressive Democrat and he fought hard for the dirt farmers and coal miners he grew up with and who sent him to Congress. In an era when racial segregationists dominated southern politics, Elliott worked with many of the important political leaders of the 20th century, including Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy and powerful House Speaker Sam Rayburn. He was instrumental in passing the National Defense Education Act of 1958, which continues to provide college loans to more than 20 million Americans. But his brave stand against racism and George Wallace in the 1966 Alabama gubernatorial race ruined him professionally (he never returned to elected office) and financially (he cashed in his congressional pension to help fund the campaign). Even as a destitute invalid in his old age, however, Elliott kept his dignity and integrity intact. The life story of Carl Elliott is full of humor and wry wisdom and explains how he made his way across a stage as big as America, influencing its politics and future, and then emerged, belatedly, as an unsung hero of the fight for civil rights and equality.

Drawing on the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and novelists such as Walker Percy, Paul Auster and Graham Greene, A Philosophical Disease brings to the bioethical discussion larger philosophical questions about the sense and significance of human life. Carl Elliott moves beyond the standard menu of bioethical issues to explore the relationship of illness to identity, and of mental illness to spiritual illness. He also examines the treatment of children born with ambiguous genitalia, the claims of Deaf culture, and the morality of self-sacrifice. This book focuses on a different sensibility in bioethics; how we use concepts, and how they relate to our own particular social institutions.

Drawing on the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and novelists such as Walker Percy, Paul Auster and Graham Greene, A Philosophical Disease brings to the bioethical discussion larger philosophical questions about the sense and significance of human life. Carl Elliott moves beyond the standard menu of bioethical issues to explore the relationship of illness to identity, and of mental illness to spiritual illness. He also examines the treatment of children born with ambiguous genitalia, the claims of Deaf culture, and the morality of self-sacrifice. This book focuses on a different sensibility in bioethics; how we use concepts, and how they relate to our own particular social institutions.

Addresses the question: Can we apply ordinary standards of responsibility to the mentally disordered offender? In The Rules of Insanity, Carl Elliott draws on philosophy and psychiatry to develop a conceptual framework for judging the moral responsibility of mentally ill offenders. Arguing that there is little useful that can be said about the responsibility of mentally ill offenders in general, Elliott looks at specific mental illnesses in detail; among them schizophrenia, manic-depressive disorders, psychosexual disorders such as exhibitionism and voyeurism, personality disorders, and impulse control disorders such as kleptomania and pyromania. He takes a particularly hard look at the psychopath or sociopath, who many have argued is incapable of understanding morality. Making extensive use of psychiatric case histories, Elliott explores the various ways in which mental illness can affect a person's intentions and thus excuse him or her from moral responsibility.