How we cite our quotes: (Page)
Quote #1
Like many doctors of his era, TeLinde often used patients from the public wards for research, usually without their knowledge. Many scientists believed that since patients were treated for free in the public wards, it was fair to use them as research subjects as a form of payment. (30)
Sometimes, the desire to discover a new treatment overwhelms a doctor's awareness that he or she is treating a person. You know, a person? With rights and feelings? We can also see here the social prejudices about the poor. We're not sure this is what Johns Hopkins had in mind when he founded a charity hospital, but it was certainly the situation when Henrietta got to the hospital for treatment in 1951.
Quote #2
But first—though no one had told Henrietta that TeLinde was collecting sample or asked she wanted to be a donor—Wharton picked up a sharp knife and shaved two dine-sized pieces of tissue from Henrietta's cervix: one from her tumor, and one from the healthy cervical tissue nearby. Then he placed the samples in a glass dish. (33)
This simple act both set off decades of grief for the Lacks family and also ushered in an era of scientific discovery. Wharton probably wasn't thinking of either possibility when he took those tissue samples.
Quote #3
Toward the end of her treatments, Henrietta asked her doctor when she'd be better so she could have another child. Until that moment, Henrietta didn't know that the treatments had left her infertile. (47)
Although Hopkins had a policy of informing patients of radium treatment that they would lose their ability to have children, Henrietta appears to have fallen through the gaps. It doesn't matter that Henrietta would have been too ill to have a child had she refused the treatments. The burden of explanation belonged to the hospital; the burden of choice should have been Henrietta's.