Eunice Rivers Laurie

Eunice Verdell Rivers Laurie (1899 to 1986) was an African American public health nurse who worked in Alabama. Born into a farming family in rural Georgia, she studied at the Tuskegee Institute and graduated from its School of Nursing in 1922. From 1923 she worked for the Tuskegee Institute Movable School, bringing health services and adult education to rural Black farming families, and from 1926 she worked for the state in vital statistics, where she improved birth and death registration, regulated and trained midwives and worked to reduce infant mortality. She was one of the first African Americans employed by the United States Public Health Service and received the Oveta Culp Hobby Award. She is also known as a nurse of the Public Health Service study of untreated syphilis in Macon County, which began in 1932; she recruited and kept enrolled about 600 men, and the study withheld an effective cure until it was ended in 1972. Historians still disagree about how to judge her part in it.