Film Shows Effects of Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment

“It was for the greater good.”’

That is the last line from the film, “Miss Evers’ Boys,” an HBO movie about the 40-year Tuskegee syphilis experiment. The movie is fiction but is a heartbreaking account of hundreds of men suffered needlessly from 1932 until 1972.

The movie begins in 1973 at a Senate hearing on the abuses of the experiment. Miss Evers, an elderly former public health nurse, is being questioned about her role in the Tuskegee syphilis experiment. There are flashbacks to pivotal episodes over the past forty years of the experiment.

First, there is hope that a white doctor has an interest in the syphilis epidemic in a predominantly black area. But then funding for the research is cut from a foundation in Chicago.

Later, her immediate boss, an African American doctor is brought to Washington to discuss a new, smaller study of the infected men. Angry after realizing that the men would not be receiving treatment, he is told that treatment will come later. This is for the greater good.

But the treatment never came. Not after penicillin was available, not after they suffered debilitating illness due to the disease, not after many died. The 412 men in the study were told they were being treated.

Miss Evers knew the truth.

Feeling an obligation to the men, Miss Evers stayed with them.

I won’t tell you any more about the movie. But you may want to ask your students to watch it for extra credit. What was the greater good? Why would a talented young nurse with a strong moral code, herself African American, continue to allow the men in the study to believe they were being treated? As I mentioned at the beginning, the movie is fiction. But it gives us an indication as to why this study continued.

It’s almost impossible to understand this in 2011. It was impossible to understand in 1973. And it made no sense in 1932.