Carl Elliott (philosopher)

Carl Elliott (born July 25, 1961) is Professor in the Center for Bioethics and the Departments of Pediatrics and Philosophy at The University of Minnesota. A native South Carolinian, Elliott was educated at Davidson College in North Carolina and at Glasgow University in Scotland, where he received his PhD in philosophy. He received his MD from the Medical University of South Carolina. Prior to his appointment at the University of Minnesota in 1997 he was on the faculty of McGill University in Montreal. He has held postdoctoral or visiting appointments at the University of Chicago, East Carolina University, the University of Otago in New Zealand and the University of Natal Medical School (now the Nelson R. Mandela School of Medicine), the first medical school in South Africa for non-white students. He is a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he led a faculty seminar on bioethics in 2003–2004, and an honorary faculty member of the University of Otago Bioethics Centre in New Zealand. He is a fellow of the Hastings Center, an independent bioethics research institution.

Elliott's scholarly interests include the influence of market forces on medicine, the ethics of enhancement technologies, research ethics, the philosophy of psychiatry, and the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Walker Percy. His articles have appeared in The New Yorker, Mother Jones, The Atlantic Monthly, The London Review of Books, The Believer, The American Prospect and Dissent magazine. He is known for often taking darkly comic approaches to serious or offbeat topics. His New Yorker article, Guinea Pigging, covered professional research subjects, while an article in the December 2000 Atlantic Monthly discussed the phenomenon of apotemnophilia, the desire for amputation of a healthy limb. He has also written several satirical pieces, including an article for the American Prospect on Extreme Psychiatry as a reality TV show, and a piece for the Ruminator Review on "how to become an academic failure."

Elliott has authored or edited seven books, including A Philosophical Disease: Bioethics, Culture and Identity (Routledge, 1999), and Better than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream (W.W. Norton, 2003.). His most recent book is White Coat, Black Hat: Adventures on the Dark Side of Medicine (Beacon Press, 2010). In 2011, Elliott won the Erikson Institute Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Media.

More recently, outraged by the circumstances surrounding the death of research subject Dan Markingson during a clinical trial at The University of Minnesota, Elliott ventured into social media. His Facebook page, Community Alliance for Ethics in Minnesota Psychiatry, includes accounts of the tragedy from different stakeholders, stating that greed, collusion, the vulnerability of a young man with schizophrenia, and the absence of informed consent culminated in suicide. The Facebook page asserts an absence of accountability in the incident and its aftermath. The page is not affiliated with the University of Minnesota.

External links

• Carl Elliott's website for Better than Well
• Carl Elliott's website for White Coat, Black Hat
• "Guinea-Pigging" the New Yorker, Jan 7, 2008.
• "A New Way to be Mad," the Atlantic Monthly, December 2000.
• "Logical Extreme: The Next Step in Reality Television" (with B. Elliott), The American Prospect (web), 2003.
• Carl Elliott's Facebook Page, Community Alliance for Ethics in Minnesota Psychiatry (web), begun November 2012