The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Quotes

Doctors examined her inside and out, pressing her stomach, inserting new catheters into her bladder, fingers into her vagina and anus, needles into her veins. (40)

Like many doctors of his era, TeLinde often used patients from the public wards for research, usually without their knowledge. Many scientists believed that since patients were treated for free in...

Sometimes Elsie raced through the fields, chasing wild turkeys or grabbing the family mule by the tail and thrashing against him until Lawrence pulled her off. Henrietta's cousin Peter always said...

If [TeLinde] could prove that carcinoma in situ and invasive carcinoma looked and behaved similarly in the laboratory, he could end the debate, showing that he'd been right all along, and doctors w...

The Geys were determined to grow the first immortal human cells: a continuously dividing line of cells all descended from one original sample, cells that would constantly replenish themselves and n...

David drove Henrietta nearly twenty miles to get [to Hopkins], not because they preferred it, but because it was the only major hospital for miles that treated black patients. This was the era of J...

Tommy lived in what everyone called the home-house—a four-room log cabin that once served as slave quarters, with plank floors, gas lanterns, and water Henrietta hauled up a long hill from the cr...

[Hopkins] was built in 1889 as a charity hospital for the sick and poor, and it covered more than a dozen acres where a cemetery and insane asylum once sat in East Baltimore. The public wards at Ho...

Bobbette excused herself and ran home, bursting through the screen door into the kitchen, yelling for Lawrence, "Part of your mother, it's alive!" Lawrence called his father to tell him what Bobbet...