miss evers boys

The movie Miss Ever’s Boys is a documentation-drama that explores the social and ethical issues of the infamous Tuskegee Study of untreated black men with syphilis. The study lasted from 1932 through 1972, where the U.S. Public Health Service studied 600 poor African-American sharecroppers in Macon County, AL. There were 399 patients with chronic syphilis and 201 healthy men control group. Doctors treated the men with placebos, hid the true nature of their research, and withheld penicillin even after it became the standard and highly effective treatment for the disease in the mid-'40s. As 6-months turns into years, Miss Evers, the attending nurse involved in the study, continues to hide the secret behind the study and urges the men to continue with the experiment in hope of future treatment which never came, even with the availability of penicillin.
Miss Evers’ ultimate decision as to how she deals with the care and treatment of her “boys” will be left to the audience of this movie. It was an unrestrained story, revealing the hypocrisy of the United States Government through the judgments of Miss Evers. As an audience, we want Miss Evers to challenge all conventions and simply provide the necessary medicine to the patients but she struggles with the pros and cons of such a decision. As we finally see in the end, the movie fails to deliver an objective understanding of the study and it completely detailed the difficulties inherent in human experimentation from an emotional perspective. This movie points out the need for scientific integrity and education that must accompany such studies of humans. Miss Evers’ Boys depicts that although experiments support the common good, it should nonetheless be carried out in a purposeful and moral way.