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12 Suffering and Resistance, Voice and Agency Thoughts on History and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study SUSAN M. REVERBY 261 voice and agency became the central analytic foci for my generation as we fought to create a new social history and to make concerns of race, gender, class, and sexuality crucial to the historical enterprise. Two quick anecdotes of my own travels through graduate school illustrate this. When I was first in graduate school in the late 1960s, I took a European intellectual history course at New York University with renowned scholar Frank Manuel. In the middle of some lecture on an obscure French revolutionary thinker, I raised my hand and asked, “Professor Manuel, who believed these ideas and did anything with them?” Manuel raised himself up, peered down at me through his glasses past the other one hundred students in the class, and said, “That, my dear, is the wrong question.” In 1973 (after a several-year dropout from graduate school), I considered going back and went to speak to Herbert Gutman, one of the leaders of what was then called the New Labor History. Gutman was working on his magisterial book The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, which would become the historical answer to the seemingly scurrilous Moynihan report. After I explained my interests, I politely asked him what he was doing. Unfurling the almost Talmudic looking scrolls of paper that surrounded him, he showed me plantation records of slave names and long genealogical connections. “There,” he said, triumphantly pointing, “Mary was named after her greatgrandmother .” I panicked. I had no idea what he was trying to tell me and why it mattered. Now, many decades later, I can happily say I survived to become deeply focused on the questions of voice and agency and to understand 262 SUSAN M. REVERBY what Gutman was trying to tell me about agency through naming practices . I learned to have an answer to Manuel’s response that I was asking the wrong question about whose voice I should worry about, even if he must be turning his in grave to know I have a professorial chair in the “history of ideas.” I thought I knew finally how to think about this: searching for voice among those assumed not to have one while documenting suffering to consider the multiple forms that agency might take, from a full-scale revolt, to the naming of a child, to survival itself. Yet in the place where the answers seemed to have created an extensive industry in African American history, the limitations of this approach must be assessed. For as American studies scholar Jeffrey Ferguson argues, “The broad and diverse discourse on African Americans has yielded many books, but only two basic stories: those of suffering and resistance.” Ferguson goes on to claim that these stories provide “no sure answers”about the meaning of suffering and resistance while limiting our analytic insights.1 For he wants us to consider that “resistance serves more of a rhetorical deal-closer than an analytical concept, more of an answer that ends or suspends the conversation than a problem that opens it up to new territory.”2 To attempt to step up to Ferguson’s critique of this historiographic binary and often sophisticated“racial melodramas,”I am going to focus on some of my thinking that comes from completing two (and too) long book projects on what has come to be called the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study and was more formally known as a study of “Untreated Syphilis in the Male Negro.”3 I will use two examples from this work to meditate about the tropes historians use and the analysis we do and need to do in the history of medicine or health care and race.4 If anything has been paradigmatic of the relationship of African Americans to the American health care system in the twentieth century , it has to be this Study. To summarize, the crucial facts seem clear at first: In a forty-year study (1932–1972) white government doctors from the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) found approximately 400 African American men presumed to all have late-stage, and therefore not infectious, syphilis in and around Tuskegee in Macon County, Alabama. After some initial treatment was given and then stopped, the PHS provided aspirins and iron tonics, implying through deception that these were to cure the men’s “bad blood.” PHS doctors also told nearly 200 controls—men without the disease—that they were...

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