Race, Medicine, & Society Notes - March 29, 2018

Race, Medicine, & Society Notes - March 29, 2018

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Part 2

Discussion Questions:

• In Chapter 21, Skloot writes that “today when people talk about the history of Hopkins’ relationship with the Black community, the story many of them hold up as the worst offense is that of Henrietta Lacks -- a black woman whose body, they say, was exploited by white physicians.” Do you agree that Henrietta was “exploited”? In what ways and to what extent? What factors facilitated and enabled that exploitation? How do you locate this exploitation within the larger trajectory of the intersecting histories of race and medicine in the US?
• What do you make of Skloot’s alternate narrative lines, shifting between historical use of HeLa cells by researchers and contemporary accounts of Henrietta’s family? To what degree, and in what ways, do those stories intersect in ways that reveal the power dynamics that surround race and medicine (that is, the biopolitics of this particular case). What do you make, for example, of Lawrence’s claim in Chapter 21 that “She’s the most important person in the world, and her family living in poverty. If our mother so important to science, why can’t we get health insurance?”

Useful pages in book 174,160

Theoretical Concept: Michel Foucault (French Philosopher)

Biopower - Power over the biological, Social Field of power and struggle

Biopolitics - Bodies and lives are also political, what we do with our bodies. Life determines the basis of politics. Politics regulates people’s lives

• Body processes regulated by politics (government, culture, social expectations)

Official / Sovereign - Can the State control your body?

• Minor’s don’t have say over their body until 18
• Regulation reproduction (abortion, access to Birth Control)
• What drugs people can legally have
• Requiring vaccination records
• Age limit on tattoos
• Access to public health spaces
• Death Penalty (Decision of life or death)
• Does State have to provide healthcare?

Institutional Power:

• Doctor’s providing assistance that’s illegal
• Religion (teachings on sexualtiy, nuns)
• Schools
• The right time to have children and the right number to have and what happens if you don’t have children
• Funeral Industry

Organ Donation:

• Social Pressure… why not do it?
• Seems like the moral choice

Other Theorists: Agamben, Mbembe

Social Construction of Race

Precarity - live or die at any moment but there’s factors that stack the odds

Discursive Formation - Ways that people's’ lives are shaped by what is told/stories/culture passing through society

What institutions affected Henrietta Lacks?

Doctors knew they were doing wrong, not reporting taking cells during Henrietta’s life, claimed to take cells after death

Does Henrietta’s race and economic status lead to her losing control over her body to the doctors

• Lacks family too poor to retaliate to doctors
• A white family would have the money to retaliate
• Education gap

Set in the timeframe of the exploitation of the black body

Why was the family included in the book?

• Brings reader closer to family and to feel for them
• Shows the suffering family endured (no benefits from Henrietta’s contribution)
• Makes the cells more like a person
• Book not as dry (book isn’t just historical facts)
• Primary and Secondary Source