Miss Evers Boys

1470 Words6 Pages
Miss Evers' Boys is a movie based on the historical events of the Tuskegee Study, a study of untreated syphilis in the Negro male, which brought up many ethical problems and issues in this time period. This study began and was located in Macon County, Alabama. The Tuskegee Study brought people into this study by telling them they were going to cure them of their bad blood, ‘syphilis’, and compensate them with food and money. The research began with wanting to treat patients with syphilis to cure or find a way to help the Negro population, but changed drastically later due to lack of funds to continue the research. The doctors later had to accept a new research for studying what would happen to Negro males when they go untreated. This was ethically…show more content…
Evers' personality; she had a good heart, but failed in certain areas as a person in the medical field. On one such occasion was when she gave out other patients test results in the study. The doctors in the movie used their authority to keep nurses in check from giving out too much information to patients, but the patients seemed to be more like test subjects than anything else. A doctor's job is to help the patients that come into the hospital, but not keep them away from proper care. The hearts of the people at the hospital were in the right place, but having the doctors tell them they could not treat the patients hurt them ethically. The overall movie was interesting enough to keep my attention from wavering. Having some accurate facts and results in the film help keep the realism of the research study. The test results from the death ratio to the number of candidates that participated that kept the research program from shutting down. Informed consent is now required by people that are participating in future studies because of the events that took place here in Alabama. The idea as using humans as test subjects was morally wrong and should have been thought out carefully to begin with, but with certain circumstances people will do things out of conduct due to authority…show more content…
Justice is to ensure reasonable and fair distribution of costs and benefits to all that participate. The applications of the Belmont report include: 1. Informed Consent is required because the patients of the Tuskegee Study did not fully understand the study and required education to process what would happen to themselves as people. 2. Assessment of Risk and Benefits was not considered during this study for the patients were put through many experiments such as the spinal tap. This procedure was not needed but they put the patient through pain to extract the fluid from their spines regardless. 3. Selection of subjects was processed by using only the Negro population and none other because they only wanted to find out the results and experiments from them. They only counted the results for the white population from older studies. Respect for persons was not upheld during the Tuskegee study after they switched over to studying the men without treatment. They did not warn or advise the participants that stayed would not receive any treatment for their syphilis problem or any future medicine to cure them. This was deception and not informing the patients that stayed. The subjects did not fully comprehend the research and were taken advantage of due to lack of
Open Document