The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

In 2001, having arranged for Deborah to see Henrietta’s cells, Skloot now tries to fulfil her second promise: finding out what happened to Elsie. The two women travel to Crownsville Hospital Center, formerly the Hospital for the Negro Insane. Though Crownsville has lost many of its records, they manage to find information about Elsie, including a photo, but it is a horrific discovery. In contrast to a picture Deborah has of Elsie as a young child, in which she is beautiful and well cared for, Crownsville’s photo of Elsie as a teenager shows her screaming, with a bruised and swollen face, and her head twisted to one side. Paul Lurz, Crownsville’s director of performance and improvement, confirms that Crownsville was an unpleasant place in the 1940s and 1950s, with little funding for black patients who were kept in inhumane conditions. Most disturbing of all for Deborah is the fact that scientists often conducted research on patients without consent, including, in epileptic patients such as Elsie, drilling into their skulls and draining the fluid from their brains in order to take x-rays.