Eunice Rivers Laurie

Eunice Verdell Rivers Laurie (1899-1986) was an African American nurse who worked in the state of Alabama. She is best known for her work as the coordinator of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment from 1932 to 1972.

Early life and education

Born into a farming family in rural Georgia in 1899, Eunice Verdell Rivers was the oldest of 3 daughters. She attended Tuskegee Institute's School of Nursing and graduated in 1922.

Career

Beginning in January 1923, Rivers worked for the Tuskegee Institute Movable School, which "provided adult education programs in agriculture, home economics, and health." As a result of this traveling work, she became a trusted health authority for African-American farming families in the area around Tuskegee, Alabama.

In her work with the Movable School, Rivers was technically an employee of the Alabama Bureau of Child Welfare. Beginning in 1926, the state transferred her to working with the Bureau of Vital Statistics, where her projects included improving birth and death registration; regulating and training midwives; and reducing infant mortality. This work also involved substantial amounts of travel to interact with African Americans in rural Alabama.

Tuskegee syphilis study

Beginning in 1932, Rivers worked for the United States Public Health Service on The Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male in Macon County, Alabama, popularly known as the Tuskegee syphilis experiment. She recruited 399 African-American men with syphilis for the study and worked to keep them enrolled as participants in the program. In return for their participation, the study offered participants free medical care, which Nurse Rivers provided. Rivers was the experiment's only consistent full-time staff member.

Although the study was initially planned to run only 3 months, it eventually extended to 40 years. During the entire study, the participants were not informed that the ailment they called "bad blood" was actually syphilis. When the study started, arsphenamine (Salvarsan) and Neosalvarsan were the only available treatments for syphilis, and both compounds had dangerous side effects. However, even after the 1940s when the discovery of penicillin offered a reliable and safe cure for the disease, study participants still did not receive treatment for syphilis. After the New York Times and Washington Post revealed that study participants had been allowed to suffer rather than receiving a known safe treatment, the Public Health Service ended it in 1972.

Historians have offered a variety of interpretations for why Rivers continued her role in a project that, by modern standards of medical ethics, was completely unethical.

Later life

In 1977, Rivers was interviewed for the Black Women Oral History Project. She died in 1986.

References

Additional resources

• “History of an Apology: From Tuskegee to the White House”. Research Nurse, Vol 3 No 4.