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Summary: The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks

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Henrietta Lacks, a black woman living during the first half of the twentieth century, died of complications due to cervical cancer and had her cells stolen from her by the people she originally entrusted to protect her. Her cells have allowed dozens of groundbreaking medical discoveries to take place. Despite the discoveries, her family lives in utter destitution, and her name has been forgotten by all but the most dedicated followers of her story. Rebecca Skloot’s book attempts to correct this injustice, giving life to the woman many simply know as HeLa. Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks hammers the point home by using Pathos to highlight the injustices against the Lacks clan, using Logos to highlight the breaches of medical ethics …show more content…

When Henrietta fell ill, she resorted to the only means of treatment she could attain: the free clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital. The doctors who worked at these free hospitals considered black people little more than guinea pigs, instruments to be used to carry out experiments as they saw fit. As Henrietta’s condition worsened, her doctors observed the expanding tumors in her cervix with little concern for her safety. At one point, “her doctors tried injecting pure alcohol straight into her spine” (Skloot 93). Skloot repeatedly paints a picture of a woman with no other recourses who suffers for the medical curiosity of doctors. Near the end of her life, Henrietta endured seemingly unending pain “New tumors seemed to appear daily- on her lymph nodes, hip bones, labia- and she spent most days with a fever up to 105” (Skloot 93). Skloot makes sure to evoke vivid images of a patently pathetic woman. The use of a pathos appeal is repeated throughout the novel, making all but the most hardened reader have a gut-reaction to the disturbingly detailed descriptions of Henrietta’s

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Summary Of The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks

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In the Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, the author demonstrates the harsh realities that many African Americans faced in the medical and scientific field during the mid 20th century. The author shows the unjust practices of this time period through interviews with the Lacks family and medical professionals. These harsh realities are proven when Skloot talks to Henrietta’s family. Henrietta’s husband, Day, explains how they took samples from Henrietta’s body without consent when Skloot writes, “Day clenched his remaining three teeth. "I didn't sign no papers," he said.

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The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks By Rebecca Skloot

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In Rebecca Skloot’s novel “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” , she informs readers about “HeLa” aka Henrietta and also about her journey discovering the many traits of Lack’s past . Henrietta Lacks , known in the medical world as “HeLa” died in 1951 due to cervical cancer . She experienced frequent bleeding from her genital parts , due to a tumor that was in her womb . She wasn’t known for going to the doctor whenever she had a health problem , but in the book Skloot said that HeLa explained the tumor as a “ lump in her in womb” and had a feeling that she needed a doctors help. After being looked at by her doctor and being tested for possibly having syphilis , she was redirected to a gynecologist .

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The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks By Rebecca Skloot

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In her work, Skloot reveals Henrietta Lacks to be an African-American woman whose cervical cells were biopsied without her consent. These cells, known as HeLa (a combination of Lacks first and last name), have since been shared among various scientists and researchers and been the framework for ground-breaking research. Unlike other works on Henrietta Lacks, Skloot set out to tell

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The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks Sparknotes

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After her mother died, Day had given her and her brothers up to Ethel and her husband Galen because Ethel supposedly wanted to help the family by taking care of them. Instead, “Henrietta’s children had grown up hungry” because Ethel fed them a cold biscuit in the morning that had to hold them up until dinner. Ethel would wake the children at dawn and make them “clean the house, cook, shop, and do the laundry” but in the summers she would send them to Clover to “pick worms off tobacco leaves by hand”. When Deborah was ten, her and her brothers moved out of Ethel’s house and in with their oldest brother, Lawrence, and his wife, Bobbette. The abuse had stopped for her brothers but Deborah had to endure molestation from Galen.

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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a novel written by Rebecca Skloot meant to be a memoir of one of the biggest breakthroughs in medical history and the woman that influenced it. Instead of immortalizing her cells like every other publishing company under the quasi-ambiguous name, HeLa, Skloot decided to give the medical miracle a name and tell her story. From life, death, and hereafter, Skloot has told the story of a woman that would have gone forgotten in history, along with the ethical mishaps along the way. The story begins with Skloot telling Henrietta’s life story and her sickness.

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On the topic of respect, there was also a lack of respect related to her family. The Lacks family were not all on board for the usage of HeLa cells. Infact, not until about 20 years later did the scientist have the audacity to mention it to them. When Henrietta’s children were informed that her mother's cells are still living today, they were very rudely informed. The scientists wanted more information about Henrietta, so they went to her children to collect more blood samples.

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Henrietta Lacks’s daughter Deborah once stated “If our mother cells done so much for medicine, how come her family can’t afford to see no doctors?” (Skloot 9). The lack of ethics also points to another theme of Henrietta’s story, discoveries are more than the discovery itself, there are always people behind them. Deborah’s words also emphasize the human side

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The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks Analysis

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So she knew she could avoid the doctor know longer, so her husband drove her to the only major hospital that served African-Americans. The hospital was known as John Hopkins and it was in East Baltimore. At the hospital, she had gone to see a gynecologist named Howard Jones, who studied her long list of untreated diseases. She had many untreated medical conditions, but they were never treated with proper medical treatment. During the time at the hospital, she stated that “walking into Hopkins was like entering a foreign country where she didn’t speak the language.”

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This reading consisted of an excerpt from The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. In this excerpt the author has visited the home of the living relatives of Henrietta. They show distaste and skepticism towards her due to her being white and asking questions about their mother, Henrietta Lacks. However they seem to warm up to her and tell her about what had happened to their mother. Henrietta awas a cancer patient, and when she died the doctors had asked permission to use her cells, on the premise that it would help prevent her children from dying from the same illness.

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Henrietta Lacks

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In August of 2013, Talha Khan Burki wrote “Righting a Long-standing Wrong for Henrietta Lacks” for Lancet Oncology. Burki’s purpose was to highlight the problem with the sequence data of patients’ cells (namely, Henrietta Lacks) being publicly released and to inform people of the privacy risks involved. Burki did a very good job at explaining what the issue was, what had been done about it and what needed to happen. Generally, readers struggle and become overwhelmed when they see a large sum of information all at one time. However, while this article provides the reader with several facts, it makes the reader think and Burki did a very well at writing in a manner that prior knowledge of certain terms or concepts are not critical to comprehending.

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The Unintentional Story of Deborah Lacks Negative incidents in one’s past can have an enormous impact on that individual’s future. A person should not linger on the negative, they should try to learn from their past and move forward, and look for positive aspects in life. In Rebecca Skloot’s, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, proves that the memories and struggles that Deborah Lacks endured, impacted the way that she lived her life, and helped with molding her identity. “I used to get so mad about that where it made me sick and I had to take pills. But don’t got it in me no more to fight.

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Henrietta Lacks was a black tobacco farmer from the south who, in 1950, at the age of 30, she was diagnosed with aggressive cervical cancer. Lacks went to John’s Hopkins medical center for treatment for her cancer. In April of 1951, she underwent surgery to remove the larger tumor on her cervix. Henrietta Lacks, died three days following the surgery. Even though Henrietta Lacks died, her cells from the tumor have lived on and have made a major impact on the biomedical community.

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569 Words | 3 Pages

There is a large controversy over ethics and the part that it plays in medicine. Where is the line between advancement and patient rights? The issue of tissue ownership and information ownerships is only one of the many problems that Henrietta and her family are stuck dealing with. But, before Rebekkah Skloot introduces the readers to Henrietta and her cells, Skloot opens with an epigraph from Elie Wiesel. By using Wiesel’s epigraph Skloot creates the tone for the rest of the novel.

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Bushra Pirzada Professor Swann Engh-302 October 4th 2015 Rhetorical Analysis: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks written by Rebecca Skloot tells the story of a woman named Henrietta Lacks who has her cervical cancer. It further goes to tell the audience how Henrietta altered medicine unknowingly. Henrietta Lacks was initially diagnosed with cervical cancer in 1951; however, the doctors at John Hopkins took sample tissues from her cervix without her permission. The sample tissues taken from Henrietta’s cervix were used to conduct scientific research as well as to develop vaccines in the suture.

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They thought the doctors were still trying to cure her” (Skloot, 2010, p. 65). Imagine being in Day’s position, finally realizing that your wife’s final days are near. The amount of strength one must have to absorb this information without appearing heartbroken. Skloot highlights Day’s endurance throughout Henrietta’s suffering - especially during a decade when emotion was meant to be feminine. She is able to descriptively display the cancer from Day’s point of view; Skloot also shows how it affects the family’s dynamic in the

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