History Archive

Henrietta Lacks and the Tragic Story of Medical Ethics, Racial Politics and Health Care Reform in America

By Amy Thibodeau, February 3, 2010, 5:54 pm in History, Medicine, Present

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For months, the world has watched eagerly as Obama has tried to navigate the juggernaut of health care reform in the United States. I’m from Canada and I currently live in the United Kingdom, both countries with a long and ardent history of public health care. Maybe that’s why I don’t understand how such a great number of people can be so opposed to the idea that everyone deserves to be able to see a doctor when they are unwell. As recently as today, the Senate is giving no indication of when the watered down Plan B will be passed or when millions of uninsured American citizens can expect some support from their government.

In light of all that is going on with health care reform, Rebecca Skloot‘s book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks becomes all the more poignant, relevant and sad. It’s the true story of a woman who has been largely ignored by the people who write history, despite her involuntary but undeniably great contribution to science over the last century. The reasons for her omission are complex, and no doubt begins and ends with the fact that she was a “poor and largely illiterate Virginia tobacco farmer, the great-great-granddaughter of slaves. Born in 1920, she died from an aggressive cervical cancer at 31, leaving behind five children. No obituaries of Mrs. Lacks appeared in newspapers. She was buried in an unmarked grave.” (source) Her cancer was extremely aggressive and at some point, without her knowledge or consent or that of her family, cells (now called HeLa cells by scientists) were taken from her diseased cervix and have been used as the basis for medical invention for decades.

There are … “trillions more of her cells growing in laboratories now than there ever were in her body.” Laid end to end, the world’s HeLa cells would today wrap around the earth three times. Because HeLa cells reproduced with what the author calls a “mythological intensity,” they could be used in test after test. “They helped with some of the most important advances in medicine: the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization” … HeLa cells were used to learn how nuclear bombs affect humans, and to study herpes, leukemia, Parkinson’s disease and AIDS. They were sent up in the first space missions, to see what becomes of human cells in zero gravity. (source)

The only reason anyone knows about Henrietta Lacks’s contribution is because, decades after her death, doctors began to take blood samples from her surviving relatives to be able to better understand and study HeLa cells. Today, many of her relatives are living in Baltimore and, like Lacks herself did, they struggle to get by. Despite this, they are luckier than Lacks’s daughter who was institutionalised in what must have been a hellish facility – The Hospital for the Negro Insane – where she died at the age of 15. The story defies imagination and inspires disbelief, followed by a combination of anger and horror. According to Skloot’s research, the medical tradition has a long history of experimenting on African Americans in the name of science.

What does this have to do with health care reform?

Says one of Henrietta Lacks surviving sons, “She’s the most important person in the world, and her family is living in poverty. If our mother was so important to science, why can’t we get health insurance?”

Indeed.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks book jacket image curtosy and copyright of Rebecca Skloot.

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Dear Donna – How a Pin Up Girl Joined the Anti-War Movement

By Amy Thibodeau, February 1, 2010, 11:37 pm in Culture, History, Past

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Donna Reed was a beautiful American actress who was probably best known for her role as Mary Bailey, the long suffering wife of George in It’s a Wonderful Life. During World War II, she became a very popular pin-up for soldiers overseas – she visited army bases overseas a number of times and corresponded regularly with soldiers on active duty. Although her daughter said she never spoke of the letters she received, when she passed away of cancer in 1986 at age 64, her family found hundreds of these letters stored in her attic:

All told, Ms. Reed held on to 341 letters, some typed but many written in the kind of elegant … method cursive script rarely seen today. Taken as a whole, the correspondence offers a candid glimpse of a vanished era, a time when six hard-bitten Marine sergeants could write that “we think you’re swell” and mean it in something other than an ironic sense … Gauging the impact that the letters had on Ms. Reed is difficult. “I knew she had feelings about her country and participating as a concerned citizen,” Ms. Owen said. But, she added, her mother did not talk about the letters. Ms. Reed lamented to a female pen pal in 1942 that “my effort to win the war hasn’t amounted to much” and “I wish I could find more to do.” (source)

Later in life, and perhaps because of the impact the war and these soldiers in particular had on her, Reed became active in the anti-war movement as a prominent member of the group Another Mother for Peace (AMP). The group is still very active active and shares information such as the recent United Nations report Silence is Violence, End the Abuse of Women in Afghanistan (PDF), encouraging members to act speak, write and act out to encourage peace.

AMP’s Pax Mantra has been a cornerstone for women protesting against war in the United States for decades, including when Reed was a member. This simple, but powerful statement ends, “they shall not send my son to fight another mother’s son. For now, forever, there is no mother who is enemy to another mother.”

Donna Reed image by BooBooGB

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Murder Inc. – The Psychology of the Battlefield

By Amy Thibodeau, January 18, 2010, 1:58 pm in History, Present

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The February 2010 issue of Vanity Fair has a great profile on a US military sniper called The Distant Executioner. Although the piece focuses on one man in particular, it delves into the politics and psychology of killing the enemy by sniper fire as opposed to killing at close range during combat.

In 1947 an army general and historian named S.L.A Marshall conducted a study and extensive survey that uncovered that “up to 85 percent of frontline American riflemen had not fired their weapons in combat – even when under attack and at risk of being overrun.”

He attributed low firing rates to an instinctive aversion to killing at close range, when the potential victim is clearly identifiable as another human being. At the vital moment, Marshall wrote, the rifleman becomes a conscientious objector… Numerous independent studies have since found similarly low firing rates among Japanese and German riflemen, as well as among the frontline soldiers of World War I, the American Civil War, and several other conflicts. For whatever reason, the Pentagon took Marshall on faith and initiated a decades-long human improvement campaign. By the Korean War in the 1950s, surveys showed that fully half the frontline riflemen who saw the enemy fired their weapons in response. In Vietnam, the number rose to 90 percent … Of course, to fire at someone is by no means to hit him. The 90 percent figure was undermined by a significant number of intentional misses, and it was inflated by a battle doctrine called ‘Quick Kill’, which taught American soldiers to spray masses of automatic fire rather than take careful aim. As a result of that doctrine, in Vietnam U.S. infantrymen fired 50,000 rounds of ammunition for each kill they made – a ratio that would have encouraged even conscientious objectors to go ahead and shoot.

This all leads up to the discussion on snipers, also referred to as ‘Murder Inc.’. In comparison, snipers with their advantage of being able to kill from a distance expended only 1.39 rounds for every Vietnamese killed.

“Big Gun” Susan image by ttstam.

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Humphrey Jennings

By Sian Prescott, January 17, 2010, 11:25 am in Culture, Film, History, Past
Humphrey Jennings

Humphrey Jennings

A new exhibition at South Wales based Ffotogallery looks at the work of Humphrey Jennings, the English documentary film maker during the 1940s. The exhibition focuses on his 1943 propaganda film The Silent Village, set in Wales but based on Nazi atrocities in Czechoslovakia.

Humphrey Jennings has often been edited out of analytical cinematic theory, yet his influence should be appreciated as a critical figure in British war-time film making. He was called not only a film maker, but “a poet, a painter, an intellectual and an anthropologist”.

After graduating from Cambridge University with a double First in English, Jennings worked as a painter, photographer and theatre designer. In 1940 he joined the GPO Film Unit, which became the propaganda film branch of the Ministry for Information. Jennings’ films may remain in shadows of appreciation, but their importance to British cinema are paramount. Listen to Britain is often regarded as one of the best British films ever made. However, The Silent Village is perhaps one of his most powerful works.

In the Czechoslovakian mining village of Lidice, on June 10th 1942, 340 villagers were murdered by the Nazis. It was a shocking massacre of human life, either by firing range or suffering the horrors of the gas chambers. The barbaric act sent waves of anger and sympathy across the western world. Just days after Lidice, the Ministry of Information and Jennings set to work on a propaganda film based on the events, only set in the South Wales mining village of Cwmgiedd near Ystradgynlais. Using real villagers of the South Wales community, the miners felt a strong connection to their Czech counterparts.

The drama-documentary film is almost underplayed. Jennings does not use violence or action, which makes it all the more effective. We are shown Nazis taking control of the Welsh village. There’s a clever montage of shots – particularly of the small details – which emphasise the lives of the people, the reality. This is then alongside images and audio (one of Jennings’ technical strengths) of menacing messages to the villagers. The Welsh language is banned; the songs, are forbidden. Slowly, the oppression and fear creeps towards the front; the menace and threat seeps through the threads of mundanity to almost an inevitable horrifying conclusion. The line of innocent children, holding hands, being lead off towards a terrifying fate is one of the most potent scenes in British cinema. Jennings ends the film with the singing of the Welsh National Anthem, sung stoically. It is this British spirit that is captured so triumphantly and sensitively by the director.

That Jennings tragically died so young – in an accident in Greece in 1950 – arguably robbed British cinema of one of its finest ever talents. Like the lives of the people Jennings set out to portray in his films, Jennings himself is remembered in these very works. The poignant drama-documentary film The Silent Village is not only a cinematic tribute to the tragedy in Czechoslovakia, but also a lesson in how propaganda media is still important to study now, for it documents the past, illustrates what we could have lost; a reminder to us all of how these atrocities could easily occur close to home, to anyone of us, wherever we are.

The Silent Village exhibition at Ffotogallery, South Wales runs from 16th January to 27th February 2010.
Illustration by Sian Prescott

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Wisconsin Death Trip: Just In Time For Christmas?

By Jackie Mehlmann-Wicks, December 3, 2009, 11:00 am in Culture, History, Past, Photography, Print, Uncategorized

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When I was in my early twenties, an older friend leant me a book called Wisconsin Death Trip.  That particular copy was falling apart – the pages shuffled awkwardly against the spine – and seemed as old as its subject matter: a series of photographs taken between 1890-1910 by Charles Van Schaik, an American who learned photography after moving to Jackson County and thereafter spent fifty-seven years capturing small-town life in Black River Falls.

It sounds fairly dry, but the majority of the book concentrates on images of the deceased, which for some reason the good citizens of Black River Falls saw fit to dress and pose as though they were still alive.

The very idea sends chills down my spine, though the photos strike a peculiar balance between the macabre and the truly tragic (especially the portraits of young infants) which keeps you flipping through.

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To add another note of disconcertion to an already eerie discovery, the town that Van Schaik was in the midst of documenting was plagued by disease, madness, suicide, murder, addictions, business and farm failure, and an overall despair stemming from harsh living conditions – all of which seems to infiltrate even relatively innocent portraits.

The book itself, which was written in 1973 by Michael Lesy, has since been adapted into a film, which speaks volumes about the extensive resonance of this beautiful, ghostly text.

Images from Wisconsin Historical Society

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