MISS EVERS’ BOYS
The ugly facts of Miss Evers’ Boys are these: Starting in 1932 hundreds of black men suffering from syphilis in Macon County, Alabama, answered government advertisements offering help for their “bad blood.” They were treated with a combination of mercury and arsenic and enjoyed an 85 percent rate of cure. Money for the treatment soon ran out, but the doctors running the program didn’t want to abandon their experiment: instead they renamed it “The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male” and began giving their subjects placebos.
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The Tuskegee study provided its guinea pigs no opportunity for informed consent. It just watched them die and recorded the results–“research” that required the slow killing of many men. Incredibly, even when penicillin became widely available, in 1946, the subjects were not treated. The study persisted for 40 years, until a 1972 congressional inquiry halted the uncontrolled experiment. As late as 1969 an advisory panel concluded that the aging patients should not be given penicillin, citing the rare possibility that longtime syphilis sufferers might succumb to the potentially fatal Herxheimer reaction.
Initially suspicious of the government’s intentions, the patients agree to be part of the study when Miss Evers holds out several carrots–free examinations, $50 worth of burial insurance, free lunches, and a chance to ride in her green government-issue Oldsmobile. (In 1946 the government awarded each man $14–a dollar for every year served in the study; poststudy litigation brought the few survivors about ten thousand times that amount.)
That vulnerability is most obvious in Celeste Williams’s tortured nurse. Williams stretches Miss Evers on a very slow rack; her character’s clearly caught in an ugly bind. (Even so, her pivotal scene–talking the patients out of taking penicillin–could be played more darkly.)
