The book
commences with Henrietta feeling sick, in a time where doctors were poorly
available to colored people, and education was a privilege, it is clear that
people in this time were in wonder. She felt a pain in her stomach, which she
sought to her cousins for advice; to the best of their knowledge they advised
her that it was probably aches from pregnancy. When Henrietta soon became
pregnant, it made sense to blame the “knot” in her stomach on the pregnancy. A
woman knows her body, and as Henrietta insisted, something was wrong. She went
to the hospital and what amazed me was her medical record. She had been
diagnosed with gonorrhea, and syphilis prior to this doctor visit. When the
doctor examined her cervix and ran tests on the lump, it tested positive for
cervical cancer. From there on, the book goes into a lot of history about
Henrietta and her family, which really make everything a lot clearer. What
really shocked me was the amount of colored people that had been diagnosed with
STD’s. It makes sense when the book explains how her grandfather and other men
would take their tobacco to get sold, and would stay in a warehouse over night.
Where the white were privileged enough to sleep in lofts and beds, the colored
were sent to a basement and left to sleep in filth. Aside from sleeping in
filth, the men would have careless fun. There was gambling, drinking, and worst
of all prostitution. It makes sense that these men would possibly have sex with
prostitutes and then come home have sex with their wives, and pass diseases.
Who is to blame? Is it the prostitutes, the men, or society? The colored didn’t
have the proper sanitary conditions, and the men mostly forced upon sex at that
time to the woman. There were no condoms, no STD check, no free clinics, and no
birth control. The only way you knew you had it was when you finally realized
something out of the ordinary, sometimes pain, and went to the doctor to find
out you had some disease. It is important to take into account how poorly
educated these people were, so for a doctor to tell them they have gonorrhea or
syphilis it seems many disregarded it. For some reason in the opening chapter
where Henrietta’s medical history is explained, when she was told about both
STD’s she either declined or never went back for treatment. As the cancer
intensifies throughout the book Henrietta remains strong, and tells no one.
This might have been out of embarrassment or pride. What really interested me was the radium
treatment. As it is known now radium is extremely dangerous, but this is what
was used to treat her cancer. To treat her cancer they sowed a tube in her
cervix, and allowed it to react, in hope of killing the cancer cells. Now it is
easy to blame the doctors now that we know of the danger, but this time was a time
of experimentation. All these medical procedures if not new, had little to no literature
to back them up. We are lucky that modern medicine is at its prime, the
experimentation age is over, and for the most part diseases can be cured. Unfortunately,
Henrietta like many other colored patients were experiments. When Henrietta’s
case worsened and she became a resident in her hospital doctors didn’t know how
to treat her. So they attempted practically everything they knew, for the
cancer, they blasted her body with radiation after radiation, which made her
skin charred. For her pain they tried morphine, Demerol, Dromoran, and even
alcohol injections straight into her spine. Tumors kept appearing and appearing
all over her body, and still they attempted to “cure” her. When in reality they
were killing her. Now for an uneducated black person at this time, it would
make sense to avoid the doctor because one can say I was fine up until I went
to the doctor. Going to the doctor would turn out to be “worse” in some cases
like Henrietta’s, also these poor colored people knew nothing about science,
and could barely if that read. They would allow the doctors to do as they
pleased, because they were white, and educated. This made it easy for blacks to
become experiments. Henrietta was a living experiment, and those cells that
were taken from her are still alive.
No comments:
Post a Comment