Meaning that if Henrietta had contracted an STD, she likely wouldn’t have sought proper treatment. Medical treatments, especially for the black community, were severely lacking during this time. Henrietta’s husband was not the greatestĭay cheated on Henrietta consistently throughout their marriage and was probably responsible for giving her the disease that led to her developing cervical cancer at such a young age. It’s unclear if Day pressured her into sex or if it was consensual, but the relationship continued and the two were married when Henrietta was just 20. She became pregnant with their first child, Elsie, at age 14. They were raised together and shared a room. Rather, Henrietta and her husband David “Day” Lacks had a strange and unsettling beginning. This was not really a “Southern” thing, nor was it just a product of the times. She was raised mostly by her grandfather after her mother died when she was just 4.ĥ. For example, she was born Loretta Pleasant, but at some time in her life decided to change her name to Henrietta. But we know a lot now about Henrietta and her history. The movie only skimmed the surface of Henrietta’s life, focusing instead more on Deborah and the family. We know a lot about Henrietta’s backstory The book, on the other hand, takes them on and delves into every moment of the doctors’ journeys to creating HeLa cells. Of course, the movie could have spent hours getting bogged down in the details of the cell research that went into making Henrietta immortal, but then it would have been a nonfiction television show and not a compelling movie, so they left out a lot of those details. More: Why It’s So Important for Women to Share Their Stories About Not Having Kids 3. The secret was more in her life story than her death. Sure, Deborah was secretive about her mother’s affairs, mostly because the family was scared of being exploited by a journalist, but Henrietta’s medical history wasn’t exactly some big secret. The way the movie made such a big deal out of Henrietta’s medical records kind of felt of the mark. The medical records weren’t such a big secret In the book, readers get the sense that Henrietta coped with a lot of the treatment on her own.Ģ. In fact, it was a long time before most people even knew Henrietta was ill. There wasn’t exactly a line of men waiting to donate blood to her cause like the movie portrayed. In the books, we learn that Henrietta didn’t want to cause her family undo stress - she probably also felt like she needed to cope too before breaking the news - so she hid her illness from her family for a long as she possibly could. It’s powerful enough, but there’s so much more to the story, it probably would have worked better as a full series.More: Trying to Conceive? The Important Test Your Gynecologist Isn’t Telling You About 1. So when freelance journalist Skloot (Rose Byrne, struggling a bit to keep up with Winfrey in full flow) tries to bring Henrietta’s story to wider public attention, she and Del must travel down some dusty and contentious family roads. Del’s a volatile character who is desperate to fill in the gaps about her mother’s life. Oprah Winfrey plays Deborah Lacks, daughter of the eponymous Henrietta. Lacks died without permission having been granted for her cells to be used, and her family were never compensated, or told what had been done until decades later.īased on the bestselling book of the same title by Rebecca Skloot about a woman whose cells changed medical history, this HBO drama is undoubtedly well made, but somehow lacks true firepower, given its sobering subject matter. In the early 1950s, scientists at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore discovered that cancer cells from a tumour removed from an African American woman, Henrietta Lacks, were found to reproduce indefinitely – and are still being used in medical research today.
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