Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy (review)

the alabama review 242 umnist for the Montgomery Daily Post, a coroner, and secretary of the state senate. Most of all, he knew everyone, was a keen observer of people and events, and he had a sense of the importance of recorded history. Blue wrote an early history of Montgomery and compiled a list of events in the city, both included in the 1878 City Directory of Montgomery. His essay on church history was published in 1851, and his early study of the organization of the city’s churches was privately printed in 1878. Blue’s history and genealogy of the Blue family appeared in 1886, two years after Blue died. These works, along with the unpublished diary of Ellen Blue, are included in Neeley’s work. One strength of the book is the copious illustrations and photographs, which are fully explained in captions. The large number of names and the easy index will be an asset for genealogical and family researchers. Blue’s descriptions of many historical events in Montgomery have been the authority for much that has made its way into modern articles and books—General Lafayette’s entrance into Montgomery on April 3, 1825, and his reception “on the hill upon which the State Capitol now stands”; the fire on December 14, 1849, that destroyed the first capitol building in Montgomery; the city as capitol of the Confederacy and Montgomery during the Confederate period. Neeley’s edited and annotated volume of Blue’s works should be in major research libraries in the nation and included in most of Alabama’s public and academic collections. Collectors of Alabamiana will welcome this volume. Leah Rawls Atkins Auburn University Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy. By Susan Reverby. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009. xiii, 384 pp., $30.00. ISBN 978‑0‑8078‑3310‑0. Susan Reverby’s thorough account of the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study illuminates a dark subject without trafficking in the heat that it has so long stoked. With a combination of white doctors, black test subjects, and a dread, sexually transmitted disease, those who engineered the whole thing could have hardly created a more volatile situation. Tracing the study’s path from its Depression-era origins through its full public airing in the 1970s and finally to the apologies of the late 1990s, Reverby debunks the myths and legends that surround the study and in doing so shows that the unvarnished truth is horrific enough. July 2011 243 Embellishment—or maybe just artistic license—is simply not necessary to convey the depth and breadth of this tragedy. Nevertheless, and unsurprisingly, as Reverby observes at the outset, “sometimes in the stories the horror deepens as the facts disappear, rumors take over, and questions abound” (p. 2). Previous scholars, authors, and commentators have often examined the morality or the politics of the study while paying relatively little attention to the medicine, but those who have examined and defended the medicine “sometimes attempt to separate out the morals of the study from the actual syphilis.” Despite all of the analyses, many Americans still deeply misunderstand the study, and the “stories of what happened during the study have taken on ever‑changing and mythic proportions” (p. 2). Setting aside the obvious advantages of observing this disastrous episode from afar, and with the benefit of time and historical perspective, Reverby’s narrative unfolds slowly and carefully, sorting through layers of fact, supposition, and myth. This works to greatest effect when she shows how the scientists and doctors behind the study conducted what one can only describe as bad science, compounded over and again by the political and moral miscalculations of successive generations of researchers and program administrators. In doing so, they stubbornly clung to a self‑serving and artificial separation of politics from medicine, and all they really achieved was to sear “the image of the amoral white doctor when faced with a black patient or subject into collective memory” (p. 151). Reverby’s approach is clinical, even scientific (in every sense of the word). Indeed, Reverby’s careful dissection and critique of the study reflects a degree of care for her subject that was...