Katherine R’s Reviews > The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks > Status Update

Every time I approach this book I have to check in with myself emotionally. The gross behavior by medical doctors, scientists especially over the last few centuries is appalling. How many doctors have made millions on some unsuspecting patients medical profile? How many privacy violations? How many experiments were done on groups of people who never knew? This shakes my faith in medicine like nothing else.

Holy Fucking God, what the ever loving fuck?? All of chapter 17. Just what the fuck? Scientists and Medical professionals argued against informed consent because they feared research dying. Not people, but research. This chapter has me reeling. Even with knowledge of the horrible practices over seas against Jews, Romani, disabled, twins, etc., US scientists didn't want to tell their patients what they were doing. WTF

Henrietta's name was lost for a long time because the scientist who first extracted her cells allowed the press to print the wrong name and to claim he took cells after she died. He knew he was doing wrong, he just thought the end justified the complete neglect of her and her family. Fucker.

So Nazis were watching us to learn to do what they did with people experiments. Even if I didn't know about the genocide of the Native populations, there's scientists experimenting on patients with cancer by giving them cancerous HeLa cells to see how they'd react in the 1950's. That was normal practice, using poor and black patients. Convicts were also fair game up until the 1960's. So much whitewashed away...

How did doctors in the 1950's not know radium was a bad choice for treating cancer when it was clearly the cause of tumors and growths on countless women dial painters of the 1920's and 1930's, many of whom made national news while they were actively dying of radiation poisoning? And then why did they use further radiation treatment to "treat" her pain? They basically gave her a fast, painful death.