Dr. David Feldshuh
The first program of the academic year for Weill Cornell Medical College's Humanities and Medicine Series presented a reading of "Miss Evers' Boys," the Pulitzer Prize-nominated play by Dr. David Feldshuh, professor of theatre, film and dance at Cornell University. A team of actors, including Tony Award-winning actress Kathleen Chalfant, read the play to a receptive audience in Uris Auditorium on September 29.
Before the reading, Dr. Feldshuh discussed the inspiration for the play, a fictionalized account of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, also known as "The Tuskegee Experiment," conducted by the United States Public Health Service to determine the course of untreated syphilis in African-American men.
Dr. Feldshuh, who spent 10 years in theatre before he began his career as an M.D., was thumbing through medical journals when he glimpsed a blurb about the study, which began in 1932 and lasted 40 years. Though the study was public knowledge, it was little noted.
The play's adaptation as an HBO movie, which garnered a host of awards, including four Emmy Awards and the coveted President's Award from the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, helped spark discussion about a topic that had not penetrated public awareness. In 1997, the White House issued a formal apology to the study's surviving participants and their families, almost 25 years after the study ended.
The play helped Dr. Feldshuh anatomize his own values and ethics in medicine, he recalled. It also taught him something about the slippery facts of history. The rationale for the study was rooted in cultural attitudes of the time. Sexually transmitted diseases, and syphilis in particular, carried "moral baggage." Syphilis was regarded as a black disease in America; many physicians reasoned that the idea of a static black population under study made sense. They were driven by, among other motives, an element of "scienticism," the conviction to continue the study for precision of science and purity of research, until the patients' death — even when penicillin surfaced as a proven treatment mid-century.
One hundred twenty-seven medical interns took part in the study from 1947 to 1964 with no objection, and many were considered the most liberal in their profession. "There was the blindness of good intention," Dr. Feldshuh said. The study took on its own life as the patients deteriorated and the death toll climbed. The combined efforts of local, state and federal agencies in the study meant it was not a secret, but also led to a diffusion of responsibility.
"I wanted to take the audience back to a moral structure of the past, and how it can come face-to-face with the changing value systems of the future," he said. He wanted to move beyond the facts to a fiction that would convey a deeper ethical truth.
"It's fulfilling to see the role the play has in catalyzing discussions," Dr. Feldshuh said. "It's gratifying to see the response of the African-American community toward its unsung heroes."
Writing "Miss Evers' Boys" forced Dr. Feldshuh to confront an unsettling, alarming question: If he had been asked to participate in such a study, would he have? The play's wrenching content taught Dr. Feldshuh to operate under the "mom and pop" golden rule: to treat every patient as if he or she were his father or mother. His 90-year-old mother, among those in the audience, seemed pleased to hear that.
Photo by Cornell University Photography.