Eunice rivers laurie biography of alberta photos

She is known for her work as one of the nurses of the U. Public Health Service Syphilis Study in Macon County from to which was "arguably the most infamous biomedical research study in U. Born into a farming family in rural Georgia in , Eunice Verdell Rivers was the oldest of three daughters. In , Rivers' father sent her to study at the Tuskegee Institute.

For the first year, she took classes in "handicrafts".

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As part of the school, she provided various public health services to African-American men and women in rural Alabama and became a trusted health authority for African-American farming families in the area around Tuskegee, Alabama. Beginning in , the state transferred her to the Bureau of Vital Statistics , where her projects included improving birth and death registration, regulating and training midwives, and reducing infant mortality.

Rivers became one of the first African-Americans to be employed by the United States Public Health Service , thus paving the way for other people of color in this area of service. Rivers was the experiment's only consistent full-time staff member.

Eunice Verdell Rivers Laurie (–) was an African American nurse who worked in the state of Alabama.

Although the study was initially planned to run only six months, over time, this endeavor extended to a duration of 40 years. 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 s, when the discovery of penicillin offered a reliable and safe cure for the disease, study participants did not receive treatment.

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 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.

Once the news of the unethical treatment of participants in the Tuskegee Study was exposed in , Rivers retreated into silence. Contents move to sidebar hide.