The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks: Chapter 1 Summary & Analysis

It is January 29, 1951, and David Lacks, Henrietta’s husband, is waiting with his three children outside Johns Hopkins Hospital. A few minutes earlier, Henrietta had entered the hospital, gone past the “colored” bathroom, into the main entrance of Hopkins, past a lucky statue of Jesus, and then continued into the waiting room of the gynecology clinic, where she tells the receptionist that she has “a knot on my womb.”

We flash back a year, to when Henrietta tells her cousins and close friends, Margaret and Sadie, that she has “a knot inside me” that hurts terribly when she has intercourse with her husband. At first, she believes that it has to do with having given birth to Deborah a few weeks earlier, or to the STIs that David Lacks has given her in the past by being unfaithful. However she refuses to get it checked. Later, Sadie would speculate that Henrietta didn’t want to have surgery that would make her infertile.

About a week later, the twenty-nine-year-old Henrietta is pregnant yet again with Joe, her fifth child. Sadie and Margaret believe that the pain had to do with the baby, but Henrietta disagrees. About four and a half months after Joe is born, Henrietta finds blood in her underwear. Henrietta probes her own cervix with a finger, eventually finding “a hard lump” like a marble. She tells her husband that he needs to take her to the doctor because she is “bleedin and it ain’t my time.” The local doctor believes the lump to be a sore from syphilis, but when it tests negative for the STI, he tells her to go to the Johns Hopkins gynecology clinic.

At this time, Hopkins was “one of the top hospitals in the country.” Built as a charity hospital in 1889, it services large numbers of poor, black patients. In fact, the reason that Henrietta visits there is because “it was the only hospital for miles that treated black patients” due to the segregation of Jim Crow laws.

After Henrietta waits, a nurse leads her to a “colored-only” exam room. Howard Jones, an older Southern doctor, treats her. He reads her chart, finding many conditions that Henrietta has left untreated throughout the years. The chart also details that Henrietta has an epileptic daughter. Two months ago, after delivering Joe, Henrietta had significant blood in her urine, and the cells around her cervix seemed abnormal. Despite a doctor recommending further tests, Henrietta canceled her appointment. She also had recently contracted gonorrhea, but hadn’t been tested.

The author explains that it is unsurprising that Henrietta didn’t return for follow-ups; “like most black patients,” she only went to Hopkins when it was the only option.

Henrietta tells Dr. Jones about the pain and the blood, and adds that she has found a lump in her cervix. He examines her and finds the lump. While he’s seen many cancers, this one is unique: it is “shiny and purple,” and prone to bleeding. Jones takes a sample and sends it to a lab for a diagnosis. He later writes how alarming it is that Henrietta was recently in the hospital for the birth of her child, but that she has returned “with a full-fledged tumor” three months later. Either her doctors had missed the growth, “or it had grown at a terrifying rate.”