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Ethical Principles In The Film 'Miss Evers Boys'

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The tem ethics refers to the moral principles that guide a person’s behavior, with respect to the rightness and wrongness of their actions. In the field of nursing, these moral principles govern the relationship between the nurse and the patient, members of the healthcare team, and society at large. Nurses must constantly question whether a certain procedure or course of treatment is in the best interest of the patient. When viewing the film “Miss Evers’ Boys”, it was clear that the doctors, researchers, and even Miss Evers were not acting in the best interest of all the patients. This movie depicted true events of a study that took place in Macon County, Alabama, in 1932. This study was referred to as the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis …show more content…

The four core ethical principles that are called into question in the movie “Miss Evers’ Boys” are autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice. Autonomy refers to the right of the patient to function independently and the ability to self-direct. This means that patients are entitled to decide what will happen to them, and if deemed competent, they have the right to either consent to or refuse treatment. All nurses and healthcare personal would be required to respect the patient’s wishes, even if they do not agree with them. Beneficence is the core principle that refers to the act of ‘doing good’ and advocating for the patient. All nurses should take positive actions to help their patients and to have the desire to do good. On the other hand, nonmaleficence is the core of the nursing ethics and it revolves around the idea that nurses have to remain competent in their field as to avoid causing injury or harm to patients. Nonmaleficence also requires all health care professionals to report any suspected abuse. The last ethical principle is justice. This ethical principle revolves around the idea that all patients must be treated equally and fairly. This includes fairly distributing resources and time among all patients. During the Tuskegee Study, one can clearly see that these ethical principles …show more content…

All nurses and healthcare professionals are obligated to help patients and to follow through on the desire to good and not harm them. The doctors and nurses in the study did not hold up their obligation to give the participants in the study the best treatment for their disease. Since penicillin was being used for the treatment of penicillin in the 1940s, the doctors and nurses should have given the participants of the study the penicillin according to the ethical principle of beneficence. Instead of giving the participants the penicillin, the doctors and nurses continued with the original ‘treatment’ even though they knew it would not cure the participants’

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An Analyzation of Beneficence Throughout world history, many immoral research studies have been performed on human subjects. The film, Miss Evers’ Boys, does an outstanding job of portraying a study that was implemented in Tuskegee, Alabama in 1932 (Benedetti, Fishburne, & Sargent, 1997). Miss Evers’ Boys creatively depicts the Tuskegee Experiment, of which studied the natural course of syphilis in African American men. Although penicillin became known as a treatment for syphilis during the 1940’s, the subjects remained deliberately untreated by researchers for decades (Burns, Gray, & Groves, 2014). The striking unethical acts performed in this study helped pave the way towards the founding of The Belmont Report, a set of regulations written to protect human research subjects in 1974 (Burns et al., 2014).

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Although it was a dramatization of events, the film serves as an education tool for viewers, especially those who are unfamiliar with the history of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Moreover, the film is easily digestible for the audience to learn about the study and to bring awareness to it. Additionally, the film presented factual and almost precise statistics and figures regarding the study (Hermann 150-160, Kalman 6). The approach of telling the story through the perspective of Nurse Evers allows viewers to understand the moral and ethical implications of the study and misconduct of the physicians. By providing context about the patients lives before the study, the film helps to humanize them and allow viewers to empathize with their experiences (Kalman 1-2).

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