Film Analysis Essay on Miss Evers' Boys

Introduction

Miss Evers' Boys is a television film that was initially released on 22nd February 1997. The film was inspired by a true story that happened in a small town called Macon County in Alabama 1932. The play revolves around a town nurse named Eunice Evers who is forced to attend to black men who were suffering from syphilis as they are part of an experiment to see whether black people react in a similar way to white people upon syphilis infection.

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Events That Inspired the Film

After a severe outbreak of syphilis in Alabama in 1932, the federal government decided to treat men and women with syphilis in the county. The Rosenwald Fund funded the idea to treat people. As the doctors gave aid to the people, they were surprised by the way they reacted to the effect of drugs. Some of the residents seemed to heal faster than their counterparts; a situation which could not be scientifically explained. Due to this, the government launched a survey to determine the reason behind the behavior of syphilis patients. To learn how the different people reacted to the medication, the government began another smaller program which focused only on the men. In early 1930, the Rosenwald fund was unable to continue funding the treatment of patients. This gave the doctors who had started the small project an even more significant advantage as they could now study how people reacted to the disease without treatment.

The federal government took about 400 men from the county into the experiment. The public health officers made the people believe that they were under long-term treatment while they only gave them placebos and liniments. The doctors then observed the development of the men taking into account the effect of the disease left untreated. The doctors made up excuses to examine the patient's bodies and assess how much damage that the condition had done on their bodies (Feldshuh, 1995). One of this excuses was the painful tapping of the spinal cord to "check for neurological syphilis (Feldshuh, 1995)." The idea was used to get an even better look at the patient's bodies since they would remove their clothes for the so-called medical procedures.

Due to the experiment, the people in the county were not to be drafted into the army since they would be treated which was against the aim of the test. The nurse, Evers was forced to attend to the patients under study. She knew the people since most of her were her friends. She was also aware that the patients were not being offered any medical help but were merely used as lab rats in a national experiment. She knew that the only help she would give was to console the men and offer them all the moral support she could get. One of the test subjects manages to get into the army to fight in world-war two making him access treatment easily. He tried to help a fellow test subject, but the hospitals decline to offer the help.

The experiment went on for almost fifty years since it was not until 1973 that the test was stopped. Doctors came in and went out of the county over the years and collected data about the condition of the patients. The county administrators did not care about the effect of the experiment on the people.

Major Themes in the Film

Some of the ideas expressed in the movie are explained below. First, there is pain and suffering. This is evident when the men in this county are denied their right to medical care. Their health deteriorates over time as they are cheated that they are being taken care of leading to most of them to die by the time the experiment came to an end. Miss Ever also suffers a lot from knowing that her friends are suffering yet she can only offer consolation to them as they await their fate (Montgomery, 2015). It is also heartbreaking to the surviving victims to see most of their friends succumb to the ravages of the disease. The patients also suffer in the hands of other doctors who give them painful tapping on their spinal cords claiming to treat them.

Furthermore, racism is very evident in the film. The doctors choose 400 men who are all African-Americans in the study. They deny the men treatment over time and treat them as lower human beings (Freimuth et al., 2001). The men who are selected for the experiment should have been a combined race if the experiment was not racially inclined. In choosing black people, the government showed how much they despised the people who did not have the same color as theirs. The play also highlights that there were thoughts that the African-American nurses were not as good as the white nurses (Herman, 2002).

In addition to that, the theme of true love is noted. Miss Evers shows true love for the people around her. She does this by taking excellent care of the patients and even consoling them when she has no other option since she cannot afford to provide them with medical care. The patients also pay back the love she shows them by making a play and naming it after her.

Moreover, the theme of inhumanity is greatly extended. The people who run the experiment show a great disregard for human life. They even take advantage of the situation when the government could not fund the treatment of syphilis victims to study the effect of the disease on the people (Alsan & Marianne, 2017). The doctors involved also display inhumanity by inflicting pain on the patients by tapping their spines as acclaim that they are healing the disease (Herman, 2002). They take advantage of their patients' lack of knowledge to use them as study materials instead of providing them with the much-needed care.

In another instance, ignorance is noted. The African-Americans are ignorant to the fact that they are not healing as the other people were. The lack of knowledge about the disease makes them an even better target for exploitation by being cheated that they were being helped by being tapped on the spinal cord (Encyclopedia of Alabama, 2018). Due to the ignorance, they are even termed as volunteers in the later years that the study continued. The government also takes the chance to ensure that very little or no knowledge at all about the disease passes on to the patients. By keeping the patients in the dark, they get an even longer time to study them and collect as many results as possible.

Finally, there is the theme of justice at the end of the film when the patients are treated in the year 1973. This comes after a long span of suffering and being ravaged by disease. Individual human rights firms sued the Alabama state government, and the surviving patients were paid for the pain they had undergone as the civil service officers turned a blind eye to them. The average patients got for the suffering was $37500 for the survivors, $15000 for a deceased heir or representative of a patient and $16000 for a member of the control group (Palmer, 1999).

Conclusion

Finally, this film has won many awards including the Emmy award for outstanding made for television movie, outstanding lead Actress award, exceptional cinematography award, CableAce award all of which were in 1997. The film faced some criticism for portraying the nurse in a romantic relationship with one of the patients. The film teaches a lot of lessons to the modern world and highlights many social evils that used to happen. In doing so, it serves as a mirror to the society that such acts should not be entertained.

Works Cited

"Miss Evers' Boys (TV Movie 1997)". IMDB, 2018, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119679/plotsummary. Accessed 22 Sept 2018. "Themes Of The Film Mis Evers Boys - Google Search". Google.Com, 2018, https://www.google.com/search?q=themes+of+the+film+mis+evers+boys&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-b-ab. Accessed 22 Sept 2018.

"Miss Evers' Boys (TV Movie 1997)". IMDB, 2018, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119679/. Accessed 22 Sept 2018.

"NURB 461-Movie Analysis- Miss Evers' Boys". Youtube, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8I549Np9YA. Accessed 23 Sept 2018.

Alsan, Marcella, and Marianne Wanamaker. "Tuskegee and the health of black men." The Quarterly Journal of Economics 133.1 (2017): 407-455.

Encyclopedia Of Alabama, 2018, http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/h-1116. Accessed 22 Sept 2018.

Feldshuh, David. Miss Evers' Boys. Dramatists Play Service Inc, 1995.

Freimuth, Vicki S., et al. "African Americans' views on research and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study." Social science & medicine 52.5 (2001): 797-808.

Montgomery, Ayesha. "Bad Blood: Examining the Health Disparities of the African American Community." (2015).