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The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks By Rebecca Skloot

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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, written by Rebecca Skloot, begins by sharing Henrietta Lack’s journey of becoming the dehumanized HeLa cell. Henrietta was a poor, black woman who grew up in the era of institutionalized racism, which created no way for her to become educated and therefore, unable to further herself or her family. Skloot shows how Henrietta’s race dictated her life by leaving her with no choice in hospital, no chance in understanding her treatment, and no identity to her own ‘immortal’ cells. When Henrietta needed treatment for the ‘knot on her womb,’ the only hospital that would treat her was nearly twenty miles away. To show the brutality of all-white hospitals, Skloot states, “. . . When black people showed up at white-only …show more content…

When Henrietta was this far away from home and in a new environment, it frightened her into staying quiet and therefore, not understanding what her treatment was. Although the doctors weren’t treating her differently than other patients because of her race, she almost needed to be advised differently because she didn’t understand what was happening to her body. Skloot states, “For Henrietta, walking into Hopkins was like entering a foreign country where she didn’t speak the language…she’d never heard the words cervix or biopsy.” (pg 16) By feeling uncomfortable and unwelcomed in the hospital environment, it created a toxic cycle of African Americans stating that they are fine when something is seriously wrong with their health and are in need professional care. This fear seems to be rooted in the oppression that white doctors set on black patients because these doctors are seen to be of a higher class at the time. Proving truth behind Henrietta's fear was the unethical mindset of Richard Wesley TeLinde, who used poor patients’ tissue without telling them, believing that this was their payment of their free service. Researchers and doctors with similar mindsets to TeLinde’s is what created the power institutional racism which lead African American, like Henrietta, to have no

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