Lacks visited Johns Hopkins because of a painful “knot” in her cervix and bloody vaginal discharge. The basic facts about the story of Henrietta Lacks are well documented.
#The immortal life of henrietta lacks study guide full
Skloot’s book takes the reader on an incredible journey from the “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to the research laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells, to Henrietta’s small, dying town of Clover, Virginia, to east Baltimore, where Henrietta’s children and grandchildren live. Members of the Lacks family were kept in the dark about the existence of the tissue line, and when its existence was revealed in a 1976 Rolling Stone article by Michael Rogers, family members were confused about how Henrietta’s cells could have been taken without consent and how they could still be alive 25 years after her death. Suspicions fueled by racial issues prevalent in the South at the time were compounded by issues of class and education. Henrietta’s husband, David Lacks, was told little following her death. In her 2010 book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot documents the histories of both the cell line-called the HeLa cell line after the first two letters of her first and last names to protect her identity-and the Lacks family. These “immortal” cells remain “alive,” 60 years after her death, revolutionizing medical research. The destruction of Deborah’s generation of Lackses is proof that racism, classism, and sexism are still alive and well in America, and by the end of the narrative, the writer has clearly joined in the fight against all three.Henrietta Lacks (August 18, 1920, to October 4, 1951) was a poor Southern African-American tobacco farmer whose cancerous cervical tumor was the source of cells George Otto Gey at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, Maryland, cultured. Soon after this, Deborah dies, her health essentially destroyed by conditions that would have been completely preventable in a more privileged member of society. Rebecca should seek instead to help their children, bettering their socioeconomic status using the profits she will make with her book about Henrietta.
Towards the end of the book, Henrietta’s daughter, Deborah, tells the author-a white journalist named Rebecca Skloot-that it’s too late for the generation of her and her brothers. In fact, immoral reporters and swindlers even tried to take advantage of the Lackses, believing them to be stupid and gullible because of their lack of education. Despite sharing the genes that helped researchers study everything from polio to cancer to chromosomes to radiation, Henrietta Lacks’ descendants didn’t even have health insurance. The scientific community still felt no need to include this largely poor, black family in their discoveries. As a result, the Lacks children grew up not to be proud of their mother’s “immortality,” but instead to be traumatized by it. Even worse, the researchers in question completely failed to keep her family informed of the work that they were doing, or to compensate them in any way. The scientists who used her tissues in their research and innovations rarely had any idea of who Henrietta was while they received awards and recognitions, she stayed completely unnoticed for her contribution to the scientific community. Of course, these views grew even worse after Henrietta died, when her cells became known only as HeLa. Their arrogant attitude towards her stemmed largely from Henrietta’s low social and economic status as a black woman, which made her white, well-educated doctors believe that she didn’t even have the capacity to understand their decisions. Her doctors, in return, failed at every turn to keep her informed of their decisions and methods, even neglecting to tell her that her cancer treatment would make her infertile. She simply did what her doctors told her and had faith that she would be healed, even when her cancer treatments put her through tremendous physical and psychological pain.
A poor and under-educated black woman, Henrietta had essentially no say in her medical care during her life.
The problems of racism, classism, and sexism in America are crucial to understanding the narrative of Henrietta Lacks.
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