What Henrietta Lacks Faced in the Play

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot is all about Henrietta’s life and the HeLa cells. This book portrays many topics such as discrimination, racism, medical ethics, public consumption, and much more. However, these topics do all tie in together because they all are based off of Henrietta’s life. Discrimination and racism go hand in hand with each other and Henrietta of course dealt with it. Henrietta was a part of an African American family. Discrimination is when people make/show a difference towards a person based on race, age, sex, or the class that the person belongs to.

Racism is when people believe that races are unequal and that one race is superior over another.

Henrietta Lacks faced discrimination because in society, African Americans were always looked upon as the minority group. African Americans have always had to fight for justice and equality because they get treated differently. As well as in this book, when Henrietta would go to the doctors for her treatments, she would get treated differently compared to the people who went there that weren’t colored.

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Racism and discrimination have always been here since history and is still here today and we need to fix that. A lot of people have a belief that the minorities should suffer because of the race and class their in. The minorities are usually the ones in the lower class while, the whites are usually higher up there in the hierarchy. But, I believe this is wrong because there shouldn’t be this hierarchy.

We need to stop racism and treat African Americans and whites the same. People say that the whites get privileges but, that shouldn’t mean that rights should be taken away from blacks. Henrietta and her family deserve the same respect and equality than any other family.

Henrietta was not treated the best by the doctors, they treated her as if cancer wasn’t something serious. Her tumor was an extremely important problem and they should have acted upon it seriously. On page 66 it says, “Henrietta is still a miserable specimen. She is constantly nauseated and claims she vomits everything she eats. Patient acutely upset… very anxious. As for as I can see we are doing all that can be done.” The notes her doctor wrote, I felt was wrong because he put his own opinion in it and they could have done way more for Henrietta. The doctor wrote that they are doing everything they can however, I don’t think that’s true. Another note he wrote was “Patient has been complaining bitterly of pain and she seems genuinely miserable. She has to come in from a considerable distance and it is felt that she deserves to be in the hospital where she can be better cared for.” (pg. 65) The notes that the doctor took to me were unprofessional and I’m pretty sure Henrietta wouldn’t have liked them either.

Furthermore, when they took Henrietta’s blood generally they write the patients name, but in this case, the doctor just wrote “colored”. As if her skin color defines her, they are judging her because of her color. Her color should not define who she is, she is like any other human being who should be taken care of, in the right way. Something else that bothered me was on page 16 it says, “Before examining her he flipped through her chart—a quick sketch of her life, and a litany of untreated conditions…”. I personally feel this is discrimination because all of Henrietta’s information was given and even about her family. The fact that Henrietta had gonorrhea and that was written in the book is morally wrong and an act of discrimination. It’s always the minorities who get put out there and never the ones high up there. It’s the Hispanics and Blacks that have their personal information out their for the whole world to see and this is absolutely unfair and unjust.

In addition, Henrietta was discriminated because she didn’t fully know what her treatments were doing to her. Henrietta and her family weren’t fully educated so, the doctors should have explained what they were doing to her in terms that she would be able to comprehend. Henrietta should have known the effects of her treatments and what is was actually doing to her body. On page 47 it says, “Toward the end of her treatments, Henrietta asked her doctor when she’d be better so she could have another child.” This was morally and ethically wrong that Henrietta didn’t know that the treatments that were being performed on her made her infertile. This is something really important to a woman and Henrietta should have known about this because she still wanted to have kids.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a powerful book that has topics based on discrimination, racism, medical ethics, and much more. Her HeLa cells made a huge impact in the world. On page 2 it says, “… that they helped with some of the most important advances in medicine: the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization.” The HeLa cells helped in medical advances and changed the scientific game. Since, Henrietta and her cells have done so much, I felt that her family should have gotten something for it. Her own family couldn’t pay for their medical expenses but, so many other people made billions of dollars off of her cells. They couldn’t even afford medical insurance to take care of their health. This just shows that her whole life was based on discrimination just because she was a part of an African American family.

Race, social class, and gender have had an impact on Henrietta’s life because she was an African American woman in a lower-class society. This affected her at the point when Henrietta went to get treatment for her cervical malignant growth at Johns Hopkins Hospital, she was placed in the wing of the healing center that was for colored individuals. Henrietta gotten treatment for her malignant growth however, passed on because of what number of tumors there were within her and the absence of innovation. Without her insight, be that as it may, tests of her cervical cancer growth were taken and utilized for experimentation. Her family was uninformed of what was going on until numerous years after the fact, and because of their absence of training too. Her and her family’s lack of education did play a negative impact on them because they couldn't totally comprehend and understand what was occurring to their mother.