Quicklet on Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

After talking to him, it is clear to Rebecca that there has been a lot of confusion over the immortality of Henrietta’s cells. Cootie believes that they were created through voodoo.

Skloot implies that though it was common in those days for the doctors to disregard patients’ complaints and concerns, the lack of attention given to Henrietta’s pain had more to do with her skin color. If that is true, then racism killed her as much as the tumors did.

Between the primitive cancer treatments and the poor healthcare that Henrietta received, her last months must have been excruciatingly painful.

Henrietta’s doctors deemed her treatments a success and the cancer gone despite her continued pain. It was an era when doctors always knew best, especially when the patient was an African-American woman, and it was quite a while before they examined Henrietta more carefully. By that time there was a huge, inoperable tumor in Henrietta’s abdomen that spread so rapidly that it seemed like a new tumor grew every day. The doctors increased her radiation therapy and eventually hospitalized her, but the pain grew worse and worse.

Rebecca’s case, the Lacks family had been used and abused by whites in general and white journalists in particular. In Gey’s case, the public had been tricked and let down by a whole string of scientists who had erroneously claimed to have created an immortal strain of cells

until Henrietta’s cancerous cells, renamed HeLa, came along.

1951, no one had successfully grown cells outside of the body.

True it was the 1950s, the doctors were white, and Henrietta was an impoverished African American woman with little formal education, but she was still a per

Dr. Richard TeLinde was one of the leading researchers of cervical cancer in the 1950s, and he had been working with Dr. George Gey to grow cancerous cervical tissues in a lab for quite awhile. When Henrietta went to Johns Hopkins for the treatment of her malignant tumor, the surgeon removed healthy and cancerous cervical tissue samples f

Growing up in the same house was David “Day” Lacks, Henrietta’s cousin, with whom she ended up falling in love.