The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks: Chapter 33 Summary & Analysis

Rebecca explains that she has promised to help Deborah find out what happened to Elsie. After visiting Christoph’slab, the two women travel to Crownsville. They plan to stop at Clover and Roanoke on the way back.

The two arrive at Crownsville, which has a beautiful, 1200-acre campus. The main office is abandoned, and Rebecca feels that the place is ominous. Eventually they find an old man named Paul Lurz, who is the hospital’s director of performance and improvement, but also has a passion for history. He asks Deborah to tell him about Elsie, and she shows him her sister’s death certificate. Lurz takes the women to a room full of records, although most have been destroyed. He eventually finds documentation from 1955, the year that Elsie died, and even—to his surprise—discovers a photo of Elsie in the pages. She is in terrible physical condition, and looks desperately unhappy. The hands of a white woman are holding her head.

Along with the picture, the group also finds Elsie’s autopsy report, which states that her mental challenges most likely were due to syphilis, and that she had been vomiting up blood for six months before her death. As they read, an administrator storms into the room and questions what the women are doing there. Lurz states that they are Elsie’s family. He offers to give Deborah a copy of the autopsy report, and of Elsie’s picture. He also gives her the two newspaper clippings about the terrible conditions at Crownsville during the time that Elsie lived there.

Rebecca describes the nightmare of 1950s Crownsville, which was packed full of black patients, who were kept in tiny, filthy cells. Violence and sexual abuse was rampant, and scientists often conducted experiments on inmates without consent. Deborah, meanwhile, worries that Elsie believed herself forgotten by her own family.

Deborah thanks Paul Lurz before she and Rebecca leave. The pair decide to go to the Maryland State Archives in Annapolis to find more records, although Rebecca worries that Deborah needs a break. They arrive to learn that the archives have no record of Elsie. They then move on to Clover, where an excited Deborah repeatedly shows passersby her new picture of Elsie. She grows increasingly distraught about her sister’s fate, to Rebecca’s dismay.

Deborah begins telling Rebecca repeatedly that when they stop for the night, the reporter may finally look at Henrietta’s medical records. That night, she drops the records off in Rebecca’s hotel room, adding, “Knock yourself out.”