Preview

Miss Ever's Boys Film critique

Powerful Essays
Open Document
Open Document
1021 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Miss Ever's Boys Film critique
Bioethical Issues: Miss Evers' Boys
Introduction
Miss Ever’s Boys is a docudrama film that was produced by the HBO cable network. The movie explores ethical and social issues involved in the infamous Tuskegee Study. The study was about untreated black men with syphilis. The U.S. Public Health Service is said to have conducted a study among 600 black Americans from the years 1932 to 1972. This study was done in Macon County. This paper will exclusively explore the critique the Miss Ever’s Boys film using ethical frameworks. The ethical framework includes beneficence, justice, and respect for persons, duty-based ethics, virtue-based ethics, and the right’s-based ethics. The paper will identify how the above listed ethical principles were or were not portrayed in the film.
Analysis of the ethical frameworks
The concept of beneficence states that the welfare of the participants should be every researcher’s goal of any clinical trial. The movie “Miss Ever’s Boys”, the U.S. Public Health Service did not mind the welfare of the participants. To start with, this study was to study a sexually transmitted disease called syphilis but not to provide its cure. Before involving anyone in this study, the U.S. Public Health Service should have sought people consent with full explanation of the study to the participants. If U.S. Public Health Service minded the welfare of the people at all, they could have explained the study to the participants in order for them to choose whether they will be involved or not. However since they knew the consequences of the study, the U.S. Public Health Service was afraid that the people will not participate since the study was not offering any cure at all. This is against the bioethics of medical practice that requires the beneficence concept to be respected in any clinical research. So basically, it will be right to say that beneficence ethical principle was not met in this film (Stripling, 2005).
The concept of justice in research ethics



References: B. Miss Evers Boys and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study - Page 14. (n.d.). Home - Race, Racism and the Law. Retrieved September 8, 2013, from http://racism.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1634:tuskegeesylliusstudy01&catid=103&Itemid=269&showall=&limitstart=13 Houser, J. (2012). Nursing research: reading, using, and creating evidence. (2nd ed.). Boston: Jones & Bartlett. Stripling, M. Y. (2005). Bioethics and medical issues in literature. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press.

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    The material showed up in the video is all that basically recorded. Affirmation of survivors, winning homes in the relentless field, and social open passages pioneers gives a blend of points of view from which one can judge the examination on the men of Tuskegee, Alabama which was titled Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male. The video gives a dynamic record of the connection program that was fortified by the U.S. Division of Public Health and was at first given to the beating of syphilis. The attempts, started in the late 1920s, changed its inside as a deferred result of monetary edges at long last was changed from a treatment…

    • 653 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Nu310 Unit 4

    • 1366 Words
    • 6 Pages

    Beck, C.T. & Polit, D.F. (2012) Nursing Research: Generating and Assessing Evidence for Nursing Practice (9th ed.) Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott, Williams & Wilkins.…

    • 1366 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    In the film Ms. Evers' Boys, a group of doctors withholds penicillin from a group of black men who are suffering from syphilis. The movie itself depicted a true, historical (and quite controversial) study known as the Tuskegee Experiment, which took place in the times after the Civil Rights Movement. The doctors taking part in this research were trying to prove that the effects of syphilis were as severe in blacks as they were in whites in order to get more money for medication. They also wanted…

    • 389 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Tuskegee syphilis study was an experiment conducted by the United States Public Health Service in 1932. The purpose of this study was to determine the natural curse of latent syphilis in Black males who according to this article were prone to this disease. The subjects were chosen by Dr. Raymond Vonderlehr, Vonderlehr was sent to Macon County which was thought to have a large percentage of syphilitic black men to collect a sample of men with latent syphilis. It is mentioned in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks that “doctors might have actually injected those men with syphilis in order to study them” (Skloot 186). These subjects were mostly sharecroppers and tenant farmer that were mostly illiterate, poorly educated, and between the age of twenty-five and a sixty.…

    • 611 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Between 1932 and 1972, the United States Government engaged in a scientific study in which approximately 400 African-American men infected with syphilis were diagnosed but left untreated. The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis was led by the United States Public Health Service (PHS). It took advantage of uneducated, poor African-American farmers from Macon County, Alabama. The movie “Miss Evers’ Boys” reveals that the Tuskegee Study was conducted by a group of Southern doctors, and tells the story of the 400 African-American men who were the uninformed subjects of this study, which sought to determine whether untreated syphilis affects African-American men in the same way that it does white men. Further data for the study were to be collected from autopsies. Although originally projected for completion within six months, the study actually remained in progress for 40 years.…

    • 1640 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Thesis: American history was infinitely changed by the Scottsboro Boys case; the case exposed the country’s faulty judicial system, along with its civil and ethnic defects.…

    • 664 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    . The movie, which illustrates the Tuskegee Study conducted by a group of southern doctors in 1932, tells the story of a group of African-American men who are being unknowingly studied to see if untreated syphilis reacts the same way in African-Americans that it does in white men. At first, treatment is given to them but once the funds for the study are cut and treatment is no longer made available for 14,000 men, the study goes on without them knowing they have stopped receiving medicine. Miss Evers is told that once the government realizes they have continued the study, they will likely re-obtain funds within a year but the study goes on for ten additional years without treatment. The affected men are simply given placebos and then observed. They are also given spinal taps (which are referred to as "back shots" so the men will think they are part of the treatment.) Even though penicillin becomes available, they are refused administration of such because of a rumor that it could kill them and the fact that the doctors do not want the results of the study being tampered with. Most of the men die, and some go crazy; very few are left alive at the end of a ten-year period. The end result is that yes, untreated syphilis affects both African-Americans and whites alike.…

    • 636 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In 1931, nine black teenage males were convicted of raping two white females on a freight train in Tennessee. It was traveling from Chattanooga to Memphis; however, the case was initiated in Scottsboro, Alabama. Thus, the nine defendants became known as the Scottsboro Boys. In the initial court hearing, eight of the nine boys were issued the death sentence. As the author indicates, this case was a strong illustration of the intense prejudice towards black men and women in the early 1900s, and it demonstrates whose word prevailed when it involved black versus white.…

    • 478 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The ‘Scottsboro Boys’ is a reference to one of the most famous series of trials in 1930’s. The story surrounding the Scottsboro cases involves nine young African American boys and their alleged gang rape of two white women: Victoria Price and Ruby Bates. This highly questionable rape accusation would spark unprecedented amounts of trials, convictions, reversals, and retrials. Because of these trials, celebrities were made from anonymities, careers were launched and ended, lives were wasted, heroes were created, and America’s political left was divided.…

    • 1438 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Tuskegee Syphilis Study

    • 856 Words
    • 4 Pages

    The United States Public Health Service (PHS) conducted a large study regarding the causes and treatments of syphilis and gonorrhea and recruited approximately 399 black men to participate. The men chosen were poor black sharecroppers who lived in Alabama and denied any form of treatment necessary to cure syphilis. They were suffering from the late stages of syphilis and because they were not educated enough to understand what was being done, was informed that they are being treated for bad blood. PHS official’s intentions were to focus on the treating of the disease but due to lack of funds shifted its focus to study the untreated disease over a long term period. The data for the experiment was to be collected from autopsies of the men, and they were thus deliberately left to degenerate under the ravages of tertiary syphilis, which can include tumors, heart disease, paralysis, blindness, insanity, and death (Info Please, 2009).…

    • 856 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Tuskegee Experiment

    • 2455 Words
    • 10 Pages

    In 1932, in the area surrounding Tuskegee, Macon County, Alabama, the United States Public Health Service (PHS) and the Rosenwald Foundation began a survey and small treatment program for African-Americans with syphilis. Within a few months, the deepening depression, the lack of funds from the foundation, and the large number of untreated cases provied the government’s reseachers with what seemed to be an unprecedented opportunity to study a seemingly almost “natural” experimentation of lantent syphilis in African-American men. What had begun as a “treatment” program thus was converted by the PHS reasearchers, under the imprimatur of the Surgeon General and with knowledge and consent of the Prewsident of Tuskegee Institute, the medical director of the Institute’s John A. Andrew Hospital, and the Macon County public health officials, into a persecpective study-The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male (Jones1-15). Moreover, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, which began in 1932 and was terminated in 1972 by the protest of an enraged public, constituted the longest nontherapeutic experiment on human beings in medical history. Since the premise on which the experiment was based did not involve finding a cure or providing treatment, the question then remains why did the study begin and why was it continued for four decades?…

    • 2455 Words
    • 10 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Medical Apartheid

    • 521 Words
    • 3 Pages

    In the book, Medical Apartheid, Harriet A. Washington touches on some major soft points, that really made me think and I believe that if many other people read this they would be surprised as well, because when she goes into detail about the cruel treating of African Americans in the past, it is just shocking to find out what we didn’t know. Basically, Medical Apartheid is the first and only comprehensive history of medical experimentation on African Americans. It begins with the earliest encounters between black Americans and Western medical researchers and the racist pseudoscience that resulted, it talks about the way that both, slaves and freedmen were used in hospitals for experiments conducted without their knowledge, a tradition that continues today within some black populations. It reveals how blacks have historically been prey to grave-robbing as well as unauthorized autopsies and dissections. Moving into the present times, it shows how the pseudoscience of eugenics and social Darwinism was used to justify experimental exploitation and shoddy medical treatment of blacks, and the view that they were biologically inferior, oversexed, and unfit for adult responsibilities. Shocking new details about the government’s notorious Tuskegee experiment are revealed, as are similar, less-well-known medical atrocities conducted by the government, the armed forces, prisons, and private institutions. It also talked about the Tuskegee Experiment which was the most shocking out of all of it. The Tuskegee Experiment was a study that began in 1932; Investigators enrolled in the study 399 impoverished African-American sharecroppers from Macon County, Ala., infected with syphilis. For participating in the study, the men were given free medical exams, free meals and free burial insurance. They were never told they had syphilis, nor were they ever treated for it. According to the book, Medical Apartheid, the men were told they were being treated for…

    • 521 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Nursing research.

    • 5090 Words
    • 16 Pages

    Burns, N. and Grove, S.K. (1999). Understanding Nursing Research. 2nd Edition. London: W.B. Saunders Company.…

    • 5090 Words
    • 16 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    America is a nation “from many, one” as stated in our country’s original motto. We pride ourselves on the granted equal opportunity and freedom afforded to each citizen. But are these premises held true and adequately carried out? My answer is a resounding no! Our country’s intricate history provides us with the foundation that explains why and how discrimination has infiltrated and given the upper hand to the white race that has dominated the American society, while suppressing races of color. Dating back to the discovery of the new world we know as the contemporary United States, the African American race has been segregated and mistreated as exemplified through slavery, falsely relayed “scientifically findings,” and the detrimental habit of forming stereotypical judgements. This has affected African American’s ability to flourish and homogenize into in the diverse culture of the United States. Throughout this writing, I will focus on the late nineteenth century racial discrimination issues, and how they were created, through the eyes of many influential sociologists that had a firsthand look at this period of ethic divide.…

    • 1880 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Burns, N.,& Grove,S. K. (2001). The practice of nursing research: Conduct, critique, and utilization. (4th ed.). Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders Company.…

    • 3442 Words
    • 14 Pages
    Powerful Essays

Related Topics