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The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks Analysis

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The issue of privacy has been one dating back to the beginning of society. In order to protect it we have erected walls around us and called them homes, fences and called them territories, borders and called them countries. As the modern day arrived, society innovated to the point that ownership and privacy are no longer clear. Science has developed at a rate where morals and laws cannot keep up, more specifically, in the medical department. Such a problem is detailed in Rebecca Skloot’s book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. In it, privacy is breached through the intimacy of the text itself and the events in which Henrietta’s cells were harvested without her consent then used to build a multimillion dollar industry. Over the years and …show more content…

In the first chapter of the book, Skloot writes that “Henrietta slid a finger inside herself and rubbed it across her cervix until she found [...] a hard lump…” (Skloot 15). The detail that the author describes the situation is vulgar to a degree that most keep to themselves, as it is talking about a very personal aspect of someone’s life- their body. Consequently, the book itself is in and of itself a breach of privacy, not from a legal perspective but from a social and moral one. Furthermore, the person whomst is being written about passed away long before the book was written, meaning there was no direct consent from the Henrietta even if her family approved of it. If she was still alive, she may not have wanted such detail in her biography. Skloot’s accuracy was a means in order to maintain a sense of reality in her text- no sugar coating- so that the reader can have the closest idea to an unbiased view. Whether the theft was justified by saving numerous lives or not is up to the audience. The biography doesn’t only breach Henrietta's privacy, but also recites the story of how her cells were

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During treatment, two samples were taken from Henrietta’s cervix, one healthy and one cancerous, without her knowledge. For the final months of her life, Henrietta remained in the hospital until her death on October 4, 1951. Cancer had spread throughout her entire

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770 Words | 4 Pages

Henrietta Lacks was diagnosed with extremely aggressive cervical cancer at the age of 30 and within the year it progressed and she died. Skloot's very vivid medic terminology, as well as her frank and at some points disgusting imagery truly captures her conditions horror. Also not to mention the emotional pain felt by her family and friends as they watched her die. Her story is told in detail in the book, and is something many people can relate to, since cancer is such a common disease. However, Henrietta's personal story is not the only way the book elicits pathos.

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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks overviews the story of a young black woman who dies a painful death duo to an aggressive invasive type of cervical cancer, something doctors were currently studying and developing way to combat it. Rebecca Skloot, the author, takes us to journey to see through the eyes of the Lacks family. Many would call what was done to them unfair, but as Skloot lets us know, this was common practice (and still is in many cases) during that time. The important thing was that the ignorance of who was responsible for the cells that we call “immortal,” the cells that have given us a “Rosetta stone” for medical research, is now diminish, this was especially important to the Lacks. The book focuses mainly on the story of Henrietta’s

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903 Words | 4 Pages

The book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, written by Rebecca Skloot and examines the life of Henrietta Lacks and her peculiar situation with her mysterious cells. This paper will focus on chapter two in the novel and how it becomes the most important part of the book when it comes to understanding Henrietta’s life story. Chapter two is called “Clover (1920-1942)”, the chapter itself dissects the early life of Henrietta and the challenges she had growing up. In this chapter, it goes over the gender, economic, and racial obstacles that greatly impacted her. It is important to understand the socio-economic conditions that led Henrietta to be treated less than human.

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In 1951 Henrietta omplained of a “knot in her uterus” and went to John Hopkins Hospital, a charity hospital for the poor and black, to get it checked out. Her doctor diagnosed the hard lump as cervical cancer and started radiation treatments immediately. Because of the cancer Henrietta couldn’t take care of Elsie, her oldest female child that epilepsy with her other four children. So Henrietta sent Elsie to the Crownsville State Hospital or, hospital for the negro insane until she died a little while after her mother at the age of 15. During one of her surgery’s, her doctor secretly took a slice of her tumor and gave it to Dr. George Gey, a scientist who was trying to find an “immortal cell”. Not only did Gey find what he was looking for, he found cells that grew at an abnormal rate.

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Removing Henrietta’s cells without her consent seems to be a very rare scenario and this can tell how the medical community mistreats the Black Americans. A woman of black America origin, Rebecca Skloot managed to surface other different stories of maltreatment directed to the African American community. Blacks in America were taken as people with unequal rights even in a situation like this that talked about right to life. She explained horrific experiences on experimentation of African Americans, stories that were enhanced by fear seen in Henrietta’s relatives refusing to visit hospitals even for necessary treatment. In this regard, the paper will give a response to the immortal life of Henrietta Lacks.

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533 Words | 3 Pages

Henrietta was a victim of the unethical methods that took place at John Hopkins hospital. She was violated when they decided to take her cells without her permission, and she was never told that they had taken her cells before she passed away. After, Henrietta passed away her family suffered greatly. Her husband, Day, did not take care of the children well. Henrietta was the only one in the family who visited Elsie, who was at Crownsville State Hospital, which was an hour and a half south of Baltimore (Skloot 45).

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1146 Words | 5 Pages

Since Henrietta lived in a time when discrimination was not uncommon, the reaction of the public today would differ greatly from if the book had been published in the 1950s. For example, on the treatment of African Americans, Skloot states, “they recruited hundreds of African-American men with syphilis, then watched them die slow, painful, and preventable deaths, even after they realized penicillin could cure them”. Clearly, this quote demonstrates the racial discrimination present during the time of Henrietta because African Americans were often treated as test subjects, instead of as human beings. In addition, doctors were considered to be trustworthy individuals because of their high degree of education. Even if African Americans were aware of their unfair treatment, they accepted racial segregation as common practice and were grateful to be receiving any form of treatment.

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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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Racism in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Imagine your mother, sister, wife, or cousin was diagnosed with cervical cancer and you believed the doctors were doing everything in their power to help her. Only later you discovered her cells were used for research without consent and she was not properly informed of the risks of her treatment due to her race. This story happened and is told by Rebecca Skloot in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Skloot use of narrative and her writing style enhances the understanding of the story. Henrietta Lacks was a young black woman who was diagnosed with cervical cancer at John Hopkins Hospital.

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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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989 Words | 4 Pages

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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The statute defined contraceptives as obscene and illicit, making it a federal offense to disseminate birth control through the mail or across state lines.” (Anthony Comstock’s ‘Chastity’). During this time, Anthony wanted to censor the knowledge and access to obscene contraceptives and obscene writings. This was a “controversial law because it limited the reproductive right of women and violated every person’s right to privacy”(Seward). The censorship he put on women and society caused the government to gain more control over the people by limiting the information they knew.

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The right to privacy described in Polit and Beck (2017) addresses research with humans and that it involves personal intrusion. Truman did not ensure his research was not more intrusive than it needed to be and did not maintain Perry’s

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An essential part of modern society relied on trust, especially the trust of doctors and scientists. People had the right to make an informed decision about their bodies and body parts. People had a right to their body parts, both attached and cell samples collected by doctors. The actions that the medical professions made will continue to affect future generations in both positive and negative ways. In the contemporary biographical novel, the Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot used logical opinions to argue about the importance of consent to reveal the lack of morality from those in the medical field which continues to persist today.

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