In the Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the author Rebecca Skloot gets the inside information from Henrietta's family to see what their opinions are. Bobette, Lawrence's wife, had his own comments on the doctors. Here is one of his statements.
"You know what is a myth?" Bobette snapped from the recliner. "Everybody always saying Henrietta Lacks donated those cells. She didnt donate nothing. They took them and didnt ask." She inhaled a deep breath to calm herself. "What really would upset Henrietta is the fact that Dr. Gey never told the family anything - we didnt know nothing about those cells and he didnt care. That just rubbed us the wrong way. I just kept asking everybody, 'why didnt they say anything to the family?' They knew how to contact us! If Dr. Gey wasnt dead, l think I have killed him myself."'
I agree with Bobette to an extent. I agree that the doctor operating on Henrietta should not have just taken her cells without her consent. There may have been a bias when Bobette said that Dr. Gey does not care about any of them because of the fact that their anger is pretty obvious. There should have been some sort of communication between the doctor and Henrietta's family. What kind of society do we live in where we do know what is happening to us? But then again this is reality. We are living in a time period where not everyone is telling us exactly what is happening in the world. Social media twists views and officials in the government avert their eyes so that us Americans will not get hurt. But truth be told, we are getting hurt. We are being lied to about information we should be told about in the first place and it is all on our decision. After all America is the land of the free. Even though I agree with Bobette, I do not agree with him in that he wanted to kill the doctor for doing such a thing. Yes, it was pretty irrational for the doctors to do so, but then again this has helped so many people in the world. We may find it extreme to think about just the outcomes and not the true story, but sometimes the results overcome what actually happened.
1 comment:
I agree completely with you varn. Whether individuals or the government think they are protecting us or doing right by us, they are sheltering us too much and ultimately do more damage than good. We need to be better informed of issues, especially ones regarding safety and our welfare, in order to better decide how to protect ourselves. We cannot rely on the good nature of others for that, as seen with Henrietta's case. If she wasn't told what was happening to her body, or if she had died before the doctor finally decided to do the right thing and confess, then her family should have at least been informed of what took place when she was being operated on. Its a scary thought to think that there are literally thousands upon thousands of events and just ridiculous amounts of information that are unknown to the general public, all to better protect us. Well with people like Dr. Gey, i think that we need to focus more on protecting ourselves instead of delegating that job to others.
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