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Racism In The Life Of Henrietta Lacks By Rebecca Skloot

1566 Words7 Pages

In today’s society people are faced with the idea of racism. There are groups and riots that protest supporting the motto “black lives matter.” The problem of racism can be found in a very important part of the world today: medicine. Racism has been an issue in medicine for a long time. Although it may not be as extreme, everyone from patients to doctors is affected by these issues. In medicine, racism has affected people in a negative way. As people from different races appear in hospitals today, they stay in the same rooms, undergo the same treatments, and receive the same cares and concerns. This was not always the case. Patients of color would be put into a separate part of the hospital. The colored part of the hospital differed greatly …show more content…

In The Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, Henrietta Lacks was a patient at the Hospital of John Hopkins in the 1940s. While receiving treatment for her cervical cancer, cells from her tumor were taken without her consent. These cells were named HeLa and are very important to medicine today because her cells are immortal. The HeLa cells have been involved in a lot of things, such as the polio vaccination and cloning. These and many more experiments add up to be worth billions of dollars. However, the family has not received any money for these cells. They took advantage of Henrietta because she was African American. Henrietta was not the only African-American victimized by John Hopkin’s Hospital; many others were cheated as well: “In 1969, a Hopkins researcher used blood samples from more than 7,000 neighborhood children -- most of them from poor black families -- to look for a genetic predisposition to criminal behavior. The researcher didn’t get consent” (Skloot 167). John Hopkins took advantage of these children without their families knowing what was going on. The John Hopkins Hospital was not the only place that violated people with color in this way. A study was done in Macon County, Alabama with black male patients who had syphilis. This study was designed to find out a history

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