Henrietta’s Illness Begins
In January 1951, Henrietta Lacks went to Johns Hopkins Hospital because she felt a hard knot in her womb and had been bleeding for months. She was only thirty, a mother of five, and like many Black patients in the Jim Crow South, she had limited access to medical care. Johns Hopkins was one of the few hospitals in the area that treated Black patients, but it did so in segregated wards.
Doctors found a tumor on her cervix unlike anything they had seen before. It was shiny, dark, and bled easily when touched. A biopsy showed that Henrietta had cervical cancer. She did not fully share the seriousness of the diagnosis with her family, and she entered treatment believing the doctors would help fix the problem.
At the same time, researchers at Hopkins were trying to solve a major scientific problem. Human cells taken from the body usually died quickly in the lab. Without living cells, scientists could not study disease well, test treatments, or understand how cancer behaved. That need for research would soon become tightly connected to Henrietta’s care.
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