A Hard Book

 

      I've been slowly working though the book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. The book was on a list of medical subject books being read by a book club I'd heard of. Since I'm looking for way to crawl out of my comfort zone, I decided to check it out.

   Henriette Lacks was an African American woman who was diagnosed with  cervical cancer in 1951. It was a very aggressive type cancer. The book describes the treatment for those cancers which by today's standards is pretty barbaric and hard to read. They used radium to literally burn the tumor away. During the treatment one of the doctors took a tissue sample of her tumour and the healthy tissue surrounding it although she had not given permission for him to do so. The cells were cultured in a lab and it was found that unlike the cells from other tissue cultures they not only did not die, but grew. Because of this,  the cells were grown for wide use among researchers who were looking for human tissue for use in their experiments.

   One of the things that bothered me in this book was how little patients were told about their treatment and the side effects. Maybe this was due to the racism of the time. Henrietta was not told that her treatments would render her infertile. She said that if she'd known that she would have refused treatment. The cancer metastasized although the doctors ignored it until she finally insisted that she be cared for in the hospital. She died in early October 1951 at age 31. She was buried near her mother in an unmarked grave. 

   There is a scene in the book that describes a limited autopsy that was done on Henrietta. Tumors had grown over many of her organs. Smaller tumors covered the rest. A lab assistant  was standing by to take samples of the tumour back to the lab when she noticed the chipped red nail polish on Henrietta's feet. For the first time the lab assistant realized that the cells that hey had been growing came from a human being. It had never occurred to her before.

   Scenes like that are forcing me to read the book at a slower pace than I normally would. The book details how labs all over the country were growing HeLa cells as they were known for use doing research on all kinds of diseases. Some of the cells were injected by researchers into people to see if they would develop into cancer since the cells were cancer cells. The people getting these injections did not know why they were getting the or the risks involved. At that time informed consent was not routinely done.

   Finally a small group of doctors objected citing the Nuremburg code that was formulated after World War II as a result of the experiments that Nazi doctors were doing on human subjects. Things improved. As someone who is involved in the medical field it is hard for me to understand that there was a time when the medical profession didn't have any standards in place to protect those who volunteered or were used in medical studies. 

  I'm halfway through the book so there is still a lot more to read. Right now I'm reading about how the family found out about the wide use of the cells, since the family was not consulted or informed about anything except the autopsy. It's helping me to understand why certain groups of people do not trust the medical profession. I don't blame them.