The Human Body as Experiment: Miss Evers’ Boys Film Essay

This film is about an experiment in which doctors forbade the treatment of syphilis to patients because they were African-American and proved that they would die the same way as white people. By 1947, syphilis was successfully treated with penicillin, but scientists hid this information from the participants to continue the experiment¹. Furthermore, researchers made specific efforts to prevent the participants from attending other medical facilities to receive syphilis treatment.

The Tuskegee study significantly undermined the black community’s trust in the US public health system. Numerous African Americans firmly believe that AIDS is a form of genocide². In addition to that, the conspiracy theory claims that drug abuse is forcefully promoted in the black community by using HIV in a race war. Consequently, these people do not trust doctors and do not want to donate their organs after death.

It is essential not to allow such experiments in the future and to create international organizations to protect the rights of any person in healthcare. The 20th century was full of experiments on the black population, including the inhabitants of the Republic of the Congo, who endured the oppression of Belgium, and then the intervention of the UN. The methodological theory of WPTM turns to religion to show the equality of men and women of any race, and this is one of the right ways to get rid of discrimination. Another suitable solution is to develop a checking procedure to identify and cancel improper experiments. Finally, it is necessary to improve the existing education systems worldwide. It seems that racist beliefs exist because not everyone understands that all people are equal irrespective of their ethnicity.

Bibliography

Barrett, Laura A. “Tuskegee Syphilis Study of 1932-1973 and the Rise of Bioethics as Shown through Government Documents and Actions.” DttP, no. 47 (2019): 11.

Frazier, Cleothia. “It’s More Than Just News: Print Media, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and Collective Memory Among African Americans.” Journal of Historical Sociology, no. 3 (2020): 280-296.

Footnotes

1. Barrett, Laura A. “Tuskegee Syphilis Study of 1932-1973 and the Rise of Bioethics as Shown through Government Documents and Actions.” DttP, no. 47 (2019): 11.
2. Frazier, Cleothia. “It’s More Than Just News: Print Media, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and Collective Memory Among African Americans.” Journal of Historical Sociology, no. 3 (2020): 285.