Who Was Henrietta Lacks? 5 Striking Facts About The ‘Mother Of Modern Medicine’

Hardly anyone knew of Henrietta Lacks’ life story prior to 2010.   That year, Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks was released, and went on to become a New York Times best-seller. The biographical book told the story of a black woman born on a tobacco farm in Roanoke, Virginia, in 1920 who revolutionized medical research and saved the lives of millions, without ever knowing it. Now, a new film by the same name starring Oprah Winfrey aims to make her life and impact more widely known. Who exactly was Henrietta Lacks? And why is she described as the “Mother of Medicine”? Here are five fascinating facts about Lacks to better understand who she was and how she changed the world forever.   1. Henrietta Lacks died from a cancer whose cells also made her immortal. In 1951, at the age of 31, Lacks visited Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins Hospital, which served black patients in segregated wards during the Jim Crow era, so doctors could find out what was causing pain in her lower stomach. It turned out there was a cancerous tumor that had grown at a terrifying rate on her cervix. At the time, cervical cancer was prevalent among women and research samples were taken from those who were diagnosed with it. Richard Telinde, a doctor at Hopkins who led a research study on patients who tested positive, hoped to grow living samples from both normal and infected cells to better understand the cancer. He worked with his co...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news