The Social Contract Of Nursing

In 1951, Henrietta Lacks was diagnosed with cervical cancer at John Hopkins Hospital. Without any consent, Henrietta’s doctors took tissue samples from her cervix and attempted to grow them and keep them alive. These cells, known as HeLa cells, began to grow at an unbelievable rate; The HeLa cell became vital for the development of vaccines and other scientific research. However because of Henrietta’s race and economic standpoint, Henrietta Lacks and the rest of the Lacks family was exploited by doctors. The exploitation of the family allowed the doctors and researchers to benefit scientifically and monetarily.

The unethical practices against the African-Americans in the U.S. Public Health Service became even more evident when the dreaded “C” word, also known as cancer, struck the body of Henrietta Lacks. After complaining of an invasive pain in her lower abdomen and excessive blood secretion, Henrietta went to the only hospital that treated African Americans with illnesses of that magnitude. At Johns Hopkins Hospital, Howard Jones cut a small sample of Henrietta’s cervix and sent it to the pathology lab. After a few weeks of testing, Henrietta received a call requesting that she return to Hopkins to begin her cancer radiation treatment. During Henrietta’s first radiation treatment, the surgeon on duty Dr. Lawrence Wharton Jr., picked up a sharp knife and began shaving pieces of tissue from her cervix-without receiving patient’s consent.

In the book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the author, Rebecca Skloot, dives into a vast amount of information regarding a women named Henrietta Lacks, whose name is very popular in the medical world. Henrietta’s cells became the first immortal cells known to man, and have changed the way the medical world works. Skloot’s book also contains material about a Public Health problem, which became a great risk for the entire community. In general, Public Health is the process of preventing disease and promoting a healthy lifestyle for the overall community. Public Health has three main functions, assessment, policy development, and assurance, which all work together to help establish a healthy environment. In the book, the topic of bioethics came into play during a

As a preface to the first chapter of Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, author Rebecca Skloot introduces readers to a quotation from Elie Wiesel’s The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code: “We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph.” This establishes a firm basis on how Skloot provides an analysis regarding the treatment of cervical cancer patient Henrietta Lacks. Furthermore, it contrasts with the views of the scientific community and media outlets—who in many degrees have presented Henrietta as an abstraction of sorts. These perspectives result in harsh consequences that limit the power of the scientific community well into the future.

The problem of poor education in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks plays an important role in two distinct ways. Firstly, the lack of education in Henrietta’s family gave rise to the notorious deception by the medical professionals at Johns Hopkins who interacted with the cells; namely, had Henrietta and/or her family been more knowledgeable, a more careful approach to her treatment could have been taken without the prospect of physicians taking advantage of them. This is unsettling, because what if Henrietta declined the extraction? What would have happened to medicine without her cells and the research following their replication? This is not to argue that she was not wrongly treated, but to pose a very important question involving the persistence of essential research: what accomplishments have been done without the patient knowing of their contribution? Ideally, after the unveiling of Henrietta’s story, the answer would be none. This pushes the level of complexity even further, because even though what happened was strictly ethical for the utilitarian, Gey undoubtedly deceived the family in doing so; one may want to dislike Gey, yet his actions led to a myriad of useful discoveries in the medical field. Secondly, the absence of a

Public health is defined as a science that promotes and protects the health of communities through education and research. “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” speaks about many research opportunities that were aided by the help of the HeLa cells, which transformed into many major parts of the modern public health system. The research and treatments created was a tertiary approach aimed to manage certain diseases and to control further disability in the community. However one of the major obstacles in using and multiplying the HeLa cells was how ethical the process was. Many regulations and guidelines that those in the public health industry now abide by came from the controversial studies that stemmed form the HeLa cells. Without the bold

In the book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, we learn about a woman and her families story. Her name is Henrietta Lacks and she gets mistreated by doctors who use her cells without permission and experiment on them. Both doctors and media have abused the Lacks family and treated them more like objects than people. Dr. TeLinde, who was Dr. Howard Jones’ boss, took care of taking Henrietta’s tissues and cells at Johns Hopkins. During this time, he was one of the top cervical cancer researches. He took Henrietta’s cells and gave them to research, unknowing of what he was really doing. Michael Gold, author of A Conspiracy of Cells, published details from Henrietta's medical records and autopsy report without permission from the Lacks family.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot is a book that documents the author’s firsthand conversations and experiences with the Lacks family about their deceased relative, Henrietta Lacks. Henrietta had a unique type of cervical cancer, and before she passed away, doctors removed some of her cells without telling her. Those cells were later named HeLa and used to advance scientific research. HeLa also created a source of profit both directly and indirectly for scientists and mass producers of the cell line. In this book, the author aims to educate its readers on medical and scientific ethics, to argue against a researcher, scientist, or doctor’s ability to extract tissues from a person without consent.

Oftentimes, medical doctors performed operations or viral injections without the patient’s knowledge or consent. In Henrietta’s case, her cells were inadvertently taken from her after her death and were commercially sold to researchers around the world, all without the knowledge of her family. Through the story of Henrietta Lacks and her fellow African Americans, Skloot questions the lack of ethical guidelines present in the 1950s and the lengths to which medical research can go to find answers.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a very touching book; this book has really helped me take a new perspective on how patients were treated in hospitals in the 1950s. Also the book demonstrates how patients and research has changed drastically from how they are now compared to back when Henrietta’s cells were being used. Unfortunately Henrietta did not know that her cells were being used for research in the hospital labs, since she was unaware they were using her cells there was no way for her family to try to obtain money from the researchers to help them financially. Also, during this time period most people weren’t given the proper knowledge and consent rights to be used as research unlike today’s standards. Therefore, this leads me

Ethics, in our society, are the moral principles that govern our behavior, dictating what is right from wrong. The specifics of ethics changes as values in our society change and evolve. This occurs in Rebecca Skloots book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. One major reoccurring theme in the book is the lack of informed consent and autonomy. Fortunately, now there are safeguards which protect human rights in regard to health care and research. The Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, now part of the Department of Health and Human Services, created The Belmont Report, which is one such safeguard establishing principles for all human research (USDHHS, 1979). This paper will discuss the ethical issue of informed consent within The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the disregard to parts of the Belmont Report, as well as compare the role of the nurse in charge of Henrietta’s care versus the standards of care set for modern nurses.

When talking about research, Henrietta Lacks is a topic for discussion. Henrietta Lacks was a woman who had a history of physical illness due to cervical cancer. Through her journey with this disease, her life ended earlier than expected. Doctors and researchers discovered that her body was dead, but her cells were still alive. The concept of patient’s rights and informed consent was not heard of back in the 1950’s. Doctors cut out a small portion of Henrietta’s cancerous cell without her permission. It was then given to a doctor at Hopkins Hospital and the HeLa

After reading the story of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, I was astounded by the acts of the doctors in this book. Their research, advanced medicine and saved the lives of many people. However, what was the cost of these advances? The doctors did studies on patients without their knowledge and disregarded their patient’s privacy. They exploited people’s grieve and fear and found loopholes in informed consent to get what they wanted. Although, these doctors did what they did for the sake of science, research, and humanity, it is scary to think that only 65 years ago, what these doctors did was not considered unethical.

There were 884 million doctor’s visits in the US alone in 2014, another 125 million counting hospital visits. It is clear that society trusts the doctors and nurses that it employs to uphold high standards to carry on with the task of saving lives. Our society doesn’t blink an eye and puts all its faith into doctors without question. Society assumes that all doctors are good and ignores the potential of an immoral doctor. A study conducted by the NCBI showed that 90% of all medical students have witnessed an unethical medical practice performed by the doctors that society had trusted. This means that if you had any doctor’s visits in the last few years, most likely you were a victim of an unethical practice. This is the situation that Henrietta Lacks faced at John Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s. Rebecca Skloot details the accounts of mistreatment and abuse that followed Henrietta Lacks in her novel The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Henrietta Lacks was an African American mother seeking cancer treatment at John Hopkins Hospitals, who ended up to be one of the biggest medical discoveries at the time. Doctors at the hospital discovered the power of her cells and in doing so abused and misuse Henrietta Lacks in the process, which ultimately led to her death. Although Henrietta Lack’s cells proved to beneficial to millions of people, the misconduct performed by the doctors is uncalled for and violates the oath that every doctor had sworn to. There is no

Altruism and profit are often at different ends of the spectrum when it comes to medicine and health care as a whole. Altruism is the belief and practice of self-less concern for others over a person’s own self. One of the biggest problems in our health care system today and possibly even during Henrietta’s time is that medicine and health care as a whole are so commercialized and are only concerned with earning a profit. Henrietta’s cells were stolen without any notice and her family was not compensated for this crime. Eventually Henrietta’s cells became so important and eventually earned researchers millions of dollars. The theft of her cells had nothing to do with Henrietta as a person, but rather the doctors and researchers wanting to make a dollar off of a dead woman’s cells.