![]() The actions taken by her doctors were remarkably unfair. The scientific community had lost ‘Their sense of reality…Human beings were not human beings in their eyes. She should have been informed and by not doing so the doctors took for granted that she is a human with too. If she would have been informed this consequence, she most likely would not have received the treatment. The doctors completely disregarded her choice whether to receive the surgery or not. Until that moment, Henrietta didn’t know that the treatments had left her infertile” (Skloot 47). ![]() “Toward the end of her treatments, Henrietta asked her doctor when she’d be better, so she could have another child. By not informing her that radium would make her infertile, the doctors showed again that they did not really care about what happened to her. At the very least the doctors should have had the decency to ask for permission to take the samples.Īnother example of Henrietta being viewed as an abstraction is when the doctors did not inform her of the side effects and negative consequences of the radium treatment she had received. Such consequences being that they should have had their medical license taken away and been revived from their position at John Hopkins. The doctors who treated Henrietta should have faced the consequences for their actions that caused so much distress to the family of Henrietta. The only form signed was to conduct emergency procedures if needed, the samples of her tissue were not any sort of emergency. Henrietta’s doctors should not have been able to use her tissue for research, let alone take samples of her tissue since no permission form was signed for the doctors to take samples from her. In doing so, a doctor would lose their medical license, be sued, and possibly imprisoned. The destruction of Deborah’s generation of Lackses is proof that racism, classism, and sexism are still alive and well in America, and by the end of the narrative, the writer has clearly joined in the fight against all three.To use patients as research subjects without permission from the patient is considered illegal in current medical practice and it violates so many rights a person has. Soon after this, Deborah dies, her health essentially destroyed by conditions that would have been completely preventable in a more privileged member of society. Rebecca should seek instead to help their children, bettering their socioeconomic status using the profits she will make with her book about Henrietta. Towards the end of the book, Henrietta’s daughter, Deborah, tells the author-a white journalist named Rebecca Skloot-that it’s too late for the generation of her and her brothers. In fact, immoral reporters and swindlers even tried to take advantage of the Lackses, believing them to be stupid and gullible because of their lack of education. ![]() Despite sharing the genes that helped researchers study everything from polio to cancer to chromosomes to radiation, Henrietta Lacks’ descendants didn’t even have health insurance. The scientific community still felt no need to include this largely poor, black family in their discoveries. As a result, the Lacks children grew up not to be proud of their mother’s “immortality,” but instead to be traumatized by it. Even worse, the researchers in question completely failed to keep her family informed of the work that they were doing, or to compensate them in any way. The scientists who used her tissues in their research and innovations rarely had any idea of who Henrietta was while they received awards and recognitions, she stayed completely unnoticed for her contribution to the scientific community. Of course, these views grew even worse after Henrietta died, when her cells became known only as HeLa. Their arrogant attitude towards her stemmed largely from Henrietta’s low social and economic status as a black woman, which made her white, well-educated doctors believe that she didn’t even have the capacity to understand their decisions. Her doctors, in return, failed at every turn to keep her informed of their decisions and methods, even neglecting to tell her that her cancer treatment would make her infertile. She simply did what her doctors told her and had faith that she would be healed, even when her cancer treatments put her through tremendous physical and psychological pain. A poor and under-educated black woman, Henrietta had essentially no say in her medical care during her life. The problems of racism, classism, and sexism in America are crucial to understanding the narrative of Henrietta Lacks.
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