SPH PH 510 Lecture Notes - Lecture 14: Rebecca Skloot, Jim Crow Laws, Henrietta Lacks
6 Aug 2019
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PH510 LECTURE 14
Henrietta Lacks
• Discuss the forces that promoted the development of informed consent in research.
o Informed Consent
➢ The nature of the decision/procedure.
➢ Reasonable alternatives to the proposed intervention.
➢ The relevant risks, benefits, and uncertainties related to each alternative.
➢ Assessment of patient understanding.
➢ The acceptance of the intervention by the patient.
o Tuskegee Studies
➢ Took men who had syphilis and didn’t give them medication even though a cure was
available – no medicine was provided and the study was really unnecessary.
o Mississippi Appendectomy
➢ Women would go into hospitals for an appendectomy but somehow also come out
sterile post-surgery.
• Evaluate the impact of Jim Crow laws on African Americans ability to access health care during the
20th century.
o Laws enforcing segregation, continued through the 1960s.
o Different hospital entrances, longer wait times, and more hostile care (people didn’t like
that African Americans got free treatment), fear of doctors because people didn’t want
procedures done on them.
o Transportation and health – highways cut through primarily Black neighborhoods so jobs
and hospitals moved to the suburbs, leaving behind air pollution.
• Explain the three main threads of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and the point in the book at
which they merge together.
o Life, death, and immortality – when Deborah allows Rebecca to look at her mother’s
medical records. This is significant because from that point on, Rebecca Skloot and Deborah
Lacks officially started to work together – full vulnerability.
➢ Life: grew up poor, had many kids, was sick but still mistreated, family wasn’t
benefitting from HeLa cells.
➢ Death: race and medicine, unmarked grave because they wanted to hide her
identity.
➢ Immortality: her cells lived on and did huge scientific achievements, but still no
reparations for the Lacks family.
