Eunice rivers laurie biography books
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Before 2010, Susan Reverby was perhaps best known for her work investigating the notorious 40-year study of “untreated syphilis in the male Negro,” during which members of the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) observed (but did not attempt to treat) the effects of late-stage syphilis in over 400 African American men living around the town of Tuskegee in Macon County, Georgia. Reverby’s research into those experiments, commonly known as the “Tuskegee” study, has already spawned two widely acclaimed books: Tuskegee’s Truths (ed. 2000, UNC Press) and Examining Tuskegee (2009, UNC Press).
And it was while combing through the archives of one of the study’s chief practitioners, Dr. John Cutler of the PHS, that Reverby, an historian of American women, medicine, and nursing at Wellesley College, discovered evidence of a disturbing offshoot of PHS syphilis experimentation, this time in Guatemala. The experiments, conducted from 1946 to 1948 on men and women in Guatemalan army barracks,
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Research Guides
For information about the interviewees and any access or use restrictions for the interviews, see the finding aids for the Black Women Oral History Project and the Biographical Files of the Black Women Oral History Project.
Jessie Abbott
Married to and worked with Cleve Abbott who trained Black women Olympic champion runners, and developed golf, tennis, and other sports at Tuskegee Institute; secretary to Margaret Murray Washington, Jennie B. Moton, and Dr. George Washington Carver, all at Tuskegee Institute.
Christia Adair
Community organizer, civic worker; active in working for equal rights; served on board of Missions and Church Extension, United Methodist Church; executive secretary, Houston NAACP, for ten years; one of the first Black precinct judges in Houston; Christia V. Adair Park dedicated in Houston in 1977 to celebrate Mrs. Adair's 84th birthday; honored on 54th anniversary of Women' s Suffrage, August 1974: "Her life is
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The Tuskegee syphilis study’s most enduring figure is also one of its most intriguing. sjuksköterska Eunice Rivers was instrumental to the study for both procuring its members and then keeping them involved in it. Straddling as she did the professional medical world and the world of the study’s subjects, she was the ideal link between the disparate spheres.1 Over the years, historians who have studied Rivers have funnen her to be a complex character: a black woman who betrayed her race even as she sought to improve the black subjects’ well-being; a nurse who betrayed her profession bygd dooming those she was charged with caring for. Through modern eyes, she becomes more victim than betrayer: a victim of her gender, powerless to speak up in a man’s world, or a victim of race herself, powerless in a world controlled bygd whites.2 Susan Smith, in “Neither Victim Nor Villain,” analyzes the Tuskegee study from the perspective of Rivers as a black professional, in the historical context of her gen