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NEITHER VICTIM NOR VILLAIN: Nurse Eunice Rivers, the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, and Public Health Work
Nurse Eunice Rivers, the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, and Public Health Work From 1932 to 1972 white physicians of the United States Public Health Service (USPHS) carried out an experiment on approximately 400 rural black men in Macon County, Alabama. The study, which historian James Jones has described as 2 "the longest nontherapeutic experiment on human beings in medical history," was predicated on following the course of untreated syphilis until death.(1) Historians have focused on the study as scientifically unjustifiable and as an unethical experiment that highlights the racism of American medicine and the federal government. While affirming the validity of these assessments, I reexamined the experiment to return to the troubling question of why black professionals, such as nurse Eunice Rivers (Laurie), supported the project.
Black health workers and educators associated with Tuskegee Institute, a leading black educational institution founded by Booker T Washington in Alabama, played a critical role in the experiment. Robert Moton, head of Tuskegee Institute in the 1930s, and Dr. Eugene Dibble, the Medical Director of Tuskegee's Hospital, both lent their endorsement and institutional resources to the government study. However, no one was more vital to the experiment than Eunice Rivers, a black public health nurse. Rivers acted as the liaison between the men in the study and the doctors of the USPHS. She worked in the public health field from 1923 until well after her retirement in 1965. She began her career with the Tuskegee Institute Movable School during the 1920s in rural Alabama. This traveling school for African Americans provided adult education programs in agriculture, home economics, and health. After a decade of service with the school, Rivers became involved in the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study in 1932. How could a nurse dedicated to preserving life participate in such a project?
Although historians have noted the key role that Rivers played in the experiment, they have presented her as a victim by virtue of her status as a woman, an African American, and a nurse. Groundbreaking work by James Jones, for example, interpreted much of Rivers's participation as driven by obedience to higher authority. A more satisfactory consideration of her role as an historical...