Henrietta Lacks Racism

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Some people will know what HeLa cells are, but there are few people know whose HeLa cells are. There is a story behind it that truly exhibits the racism of America society during nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties. In fact, Hela cells are from an impoverished African American woman named Henrietta Lacks. In her book “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” Rebecca Skloot begins with a picture of Henrietta Lacks, yet nobody knows who she was. However, her cells “appeared hundreds of times in magazines and science textbooks, on blogs and laboratory walls” (Skloot 1). In addition, through the treatment of Henrietta Lacks’s time at John Hopkins hospital, Rebecca Skloot truly expose the big racial gap in the health care system.
Henrietta Lacks …show more content…
Truly, Even though Hopkins hospital was very few places where admitted black patients, they, like most institutions at the time, segregated black and white patients. When come to the Hopkins hospital, Henrietta was shocked by the door marked, “colored-only” (page 15). The door that signified the separation between White and African-American patients. Had Henrietta been White, would the same outcomes have occurred? How badly did a country that proclaimed to be “One Nation under God” divide this very land into two separate nations? The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks truly exhibits the racial disparity in the health care system. After all, the treatment of African Americans in the book “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” demonstrates the lack of ethics in the United States health care system during the 1950s and 1960s.
At John Hopkins hospital, Henrietta asked a doctor to examine the “knot on her womb” (page 13), according the Rebecca‘s book. She had been having pain for a year, and discussed it with her cousins, but hadn’t done anything until the pains became more severe. The cancer grew rapidly. At that hospital, Henrietta lacks suffered abnormal treatments that Skloot describes they were terrible treatment, “Doctors examined her inside and out, pressing her stomach, inserting new catheters …show more content…
However, the averages are a good reminder of how race can affect medical treatment and its level of success. To enrich the racial divided at this Hospital, Skloot writes “After Henrietta checked into the hospital, a nurse drew blood and labeled the vial COLORED, then stored it in case Henrietta needed transfusions later” (64). Skloot capitalizes the word “Colored” that perhaps she wants readers to know there was an abnormal treatment between black and white patients (64). At John Hopkins, Cancers were normally discovered in their later stages, when they were more difficult to treat. Especially because the poor black families had less access to adequate medical facilities, and partly because they had very little confidence in the medical community. Although suffering so nay bad treatments, Henrietta Lacks didn’t complain anything. The reason was exhibited through “The immortal life of Henrietta”, “segregation was law, and it was understood that black people didn’t question white people ‘professional judgment” (63). When reading the book, it gives us a feeling that when a black person went to the Hopkins, it was like going into a foreign country, and they would avoid it if
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