Month: October 2020

Henrietta Lacks lived from 1920 to 1951, but her cells are still around. Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a personal and scientific history, keeping the focus away from a direct moral argument. In her telling of the personal effect on the Lacks and of Henrietta’s life, she treats the family’s stories very centrally. Skloot narrates the Lacks family’s concerns and beliefs about the case in terms of her interviews with them. She characterizes the family as wronged and still bitter, largely because they’ve been kept in the dark about what Henrietta’s cells were doing, how they had been taken (including the mere fact that they had been taken), or even what the cells were. She also includes a narrative about the breakthroughs that HeLa has helped with—developing this dilemma between the wrongs perpetrated against the Lacks with the wider benefits. The merging of the the personal and impersonal medical narratives lets the dichotomy exist without being exactly resolved. It also plays to much of the honoring of Henrietta’s memory—as her children and Skloot want to do, memorializing Lacks’s life and death.

This timeline, on the other hand, is not a memorial to Henrietta’s life. It informs the viewer of Henrietta’s life’s milestones and the fact that she didn’t give consent to have her cells taken, but it doesn’t focus on that fact. The timeline is a medical history reference, so unlike the book or this Nature article, it does not focus on the morality of the situation or points of view from Henrietta’s family. Instead, it focuses on the scientific results, especially in the blurb above the chronological timeline. This shows a bias towards researchers and those achievements, so the authors more probably believe that the value derived from her cells should be celebrated.

The Nature article proposes that the practice of taking cells without consent (or doing other things) should be banned. It structures the argument around Henrietta’s personal story, using her innate rights to argue that patients like her (and by extension their families) deserve to have control over their cells. Its focus is on the opposite spectrum from the timeline, dampening the scientific achievements to highlight the ethical argument instead.

Like physiological health, mental health is an ideal, and its nonmedical cultural environment shapes it deeply. Victorian ideas about women’s place in the Cult of Domesticity, for example, structured mental wellbeing around how well they fit into that mold. The general cultural unfitness of a mental patient stigmatized mental health, which has remained today. There is gradual work to remove this stigma, but it nonetheless remains. In fact, despite great medical change around the treatment of mental illness, like the development of the “talking cure” in contrast to the rest cure or opiates, popular treatment of mental illnesses remains similar to 19th century beliefs. They are seen as signs of weakness or essential deformity of the person.

Mental health is not fundamentally different from physiological health, and it often derives from physiological issues itself, like addiction. And exaggerated in mental health diagnoses and attitudes toward ill people is discrimination, especially racially. Black people, paralleling their general medical undertreatment, remain undiagnosed or misdiagnosed for mental illness more often than white people, and American culture, at least, is much more likely to sympathise with white mentally ill people than black mentally ill people. “The odds that white shooters will receive the mental illness frame are roughly 19 times greater than the odds for black shooters,” one study reports.

Mental illness is often characterized differently by authors depending on their intent. In Doyle’s The Sign of Four, for example, Holmes is treated as ever-curious and having a very active mind because of his addiction to cocaine. Nineteenth century doctors treated male neurasthenics as hardy with strong work ethic rather than stigmatizing their disease. But nineteenth century doctors, in medical journals discussed in Washington’s Medical Apartheid, sought to discredit black people and assigned them the moniker of madness.