Who Gets Remembered? The Woman Who Provides Safety from Beyond the Grave

History is perhaps a project centred on memory and remembrance. Many people would suggest history is the study of the past, but how can it be when the past itself no longer exists? Doing history relies on texts from the past that allow us to study something that exists now but within a historical context. But what happens when the texts surrounding certain remembrances are minimalised, overshadowed or disregarded? This is why, as historians, we must learn to read in the silences and explore the “possibilities” that texts leave behind.

The HeLa Cells are some of the most important cells in modern medicine: they are revered for the HPV, Polio and most recently the COVID-19 vaccine. But who do they come from? They were taken from a black women named Henrietta Lacks. The lack of remembrance for her, until very recently, has allowed her body to continuously be dehumanised, her cells to be remembered above her personhood, and her family to mourn her without knowing the impact she has had on world medicine today. We must understand that remembrance is a structure: humans, or more specifically humans with power, decide how to structure remembrance and how to operate it. By understanding remembrance as concept that has been constructed it allows us to question what a lack of remembrance means, how can it be addressed, and why does it exist. It forces us to ask difficult questions of the silences within history and sharpen our own interactions with historical narratives.

Henrietta Lacks was a black woman, she was a wife, and she was a mother, but operations of historical power have minimised her identity to the HeLa cells. Mrs Lacks was diagnosed with cervical cancer in 1951. Although she received treatment at the John Hopkins Hospital, due to her race her standard of care was poor. Mrs Lacks passed shortly after her diagnosis, but her cells live on in many of us, in the form of vaccines. Her cancer cells were the answer to doctors struggling to create cell cultures that would survive outside of the body. Lacks’ cells had a unique ability to divide and survive, making them incredibly valuable to the medical community. When she died, her cancer cells were harvested without the knowledge of her family and transported across the world. They still transcend space and time, connecting many of us through vaccinations. Those of us who are vaccinated are living memories of Henrietta Lacks. It is high time we remember the woman behind modern vaccination success and honour her continuous legacy, rather than the cells or her doctors.

Some are afforded the liberty of remembrance from birth and for others it is our responsibility to voice the silences in our history and remember the lives that have been muted by grand histories. Henrietta Lacks’ life was muted in the grand history of modern medical success, we must voice her life, we must acknowledge her part in our medical safety. It is time to change the discourse of remembrance by looking beyond text and into the silences.

Bibliography

Anderson, George M., ‘Scientific Racism’, America (New York, N.Y.: 1909), 2007, 23.

Hacking, Ian, Historical Ontology (Harvard University Press, 2004).

Onyango, Rosemary, ‘The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. United States: Crown Publishers, 2010’, Gender Forum, 40, 2012, p. N_A.

Skloot, Rebecca, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Broadway Paperbacks, 2011).

Reverby, Susan M., ‘Inclusion and Exclusion: The Politics of History, Difference, and Medical Research’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 63.1 (2008), pp. 103–13.