Susan M. Reverby
Susan M. Reverby is Professor of Women's Studies at Wellesley College and an historian of American women, medicine, and nursing. As Wellesley's first faculty hire in Women's Studies, she has taught at the college since l982. She is the editor of numerous volumes on women's history, the history of medicine, and the history of nursing. Her prize-winning book, Ordered to Care: The Dilemma of American Nursing (New York: Cambridge University Press, l987) is still considered one of the major overview histories of American nursing. She is a former health policy analyst and women's health activist. From l993–l997 she served as the consumer representative on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Obstetrics and Gynecology Devices Advisory Panel. In l995 she was made an honorary member of Sigma Theta Tau, the national nursing honor society.
Her current research focuses on the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study, run by the U.S. Public Health Service between 1932 and 1972, which examined untreated syphilis in African American men and was conducted without the men's knowledge of its experimental nature. She is the editor of Tuskegee's Truths: Rethinking the Tuskegee Syphilis Study (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). Her most recent book is Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and its Legacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009, in press). She was a member of the Legacy Committee on the Tuskegee Syphilis Study that successfully lobbied then-President Bill Clinton to offer a public apology to the surviving men and their heirs in l997. Her work on this project has been supported by several grants and residencies at the W.E.B. DuBois Research Center and the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard. Her most recent work has focused on race and genetics and has appeared both in PLOS Medicine and Science.
Susan Reverby's work has appeared in a wide range of publications, from scholarly journals to editorials in the popular press. Her most recent work on the Tuskegee Syphilis Study has appeared in England in both the Times Education Supplement and the Postgraduate Medical Journal and in the United States in the Hastings Center Report. She has spoken widely in the United States, Australia, Canada, and Sweden on the history of gender, ethics, and health care issues. She comments frequently in the media on these subjects.
Susan Reverby received her B.S. degree from Cornell University in Industrial and Labor Relations/Labor History in l967. She earned an M.A. in American Civilization from New York University in l973 and a Ph.D. in American Studies from Boston University in 1982.
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Profile last updated: 1/09
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