Are you into medical stuff? Well, if you are, I'm sure you know all about the woman whose cells are still alive today. Not metaphorically, literally. In 1951, a young mother of five walked into a hospital with a problem she couldn't ignore anymore. She was in pain and scared. But what she didn't know, that this visit would change the course of medicine forever, and her family wouldn't find out the full story until decades later. This is the story of Henrietta Lacks, and this is Historically Unsupervised.

Hello again, or welcome if you're new here. This is episode 11 of Historically Unsupervised, and it is the first episode in my series, What a Woman, where I kind of highlight different women in history that kind of changed the world and never really got recognition for it, or just made a huge impact in society. This is a really, really good one. And now that we're on episode 11, it's been 10 episodes, I think by now I kind of have a good idea of what I like, what I don't like about recording, editing, pretty much anything about the whole process that I'm trying to figure out.

And I've decided that I'm like totally over asking reflection questions, because I fear saying reflection questions just makes it feel so like a history class, and I'm kind of over it. So we're going to come up with something new. It's a brand new game that I've decided to play with you for every episode now. I don't want it to sound too classroomy, so I thought it would be more fun to play like a game instead of just straight up asking you like reflection questions.

I've decided to call it your main character moment, because I almost want you to be put into the main character's shoes and make your own decision based on the story that you do know. And then I'll go into what actually happened. And I thought that would be a kind of fun aspect to add into every episode. So let me know what you think and your thoughts. I'll see if it's any good or not. From what I understand, a lot of family and friends are still keeping up with these episodes.

So thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you for listening and keeping up with me. I won't lie. I've been slacking on recording. For the past like three weeks, I think I've recorded every episode like the day before it was due or in this case today, the night before it's due. And I'm going to have to hurry up and edit the episode. But, you know, it's fine. We're figuring it out. I'm a little behind. I've been a bit of a slacker lately.

I hope you can't tell in my episodes. But from what I'm understanding, everybody who's been listening has been giving me good reviews. So I hope it stays that way. I thoroughly enjoy doing this. So thank you for keeping up with me. If it weren't for you, I probably would have quit this by now because it is taking up time. But I think that's just the ADHD in me that does everything at the last possible minute. So hopefully I can catch up pretty soon and at least record some ahead of time before I really get busy with my job.

But we'll see. It's also been a week since I last discussed my shadow ban on TikTok. And honestly, I don't even know what to say anymore. If you follow me on there, please go like my stuff, interact with my videos. And if you don't follow me on TikTok, please go follow me. It's literally just historically unsupervised. No underscores, no periods, no nothing. It's literally just historically unsupervised. I still think I'm shadow banned, which is just so passive aggressive of TikTok right now.

We're really just not friends at the moment. Every video I post literally only gets three views and that consists of me, myself and I. So I'm just dealing with it right now and hopefully it will go away soon. Maybe it's my content. Maybe my content isn't very interesting. I used to get at least like 30 likes per video and now I'm getting one or two and it's literally just me and my other personal account. So please support your girl.

I know you already have by listening to these, but it would mean the world if you would just interact a little bit more to kind of help out with my relationship with TikTok right now because we're not on the best of terms. I think TikTok hates me and you know what? I kind of hate it too. But you can't please everybody, so I just have to deal with it. But enough about me. Today's episode is a really good one.

It is a little dark or actually not even just a little. It is pretty dark for a majority of the story. But I do find that it is really important for people to know about, even if you don't work in the medical field or you're not interested in it. Like Henrietta Lacks, her story literally changed modern medicine in ways that you probably have no idea. And so no matter what job field you're in, what you're interested in, this is a very important story to discuss.

And I want to get into who Henrietta Lacks was as a person, not just a science experiment. So I hope that that translates well. But like when I say she changed modern medicine forever, I mean it. And hopefully maybe her story will give you some inspiration to take a hold of your health and well-being and maybe take charge on asking questions and really knowing what's going on in the doctor's office when you go into surgeries. Because everybody deserves to have full informed consent for everything.

So never be afraid to ask questions. And hopefully this will inspire you to continue to do so. So let's get right into it and talk about who Henrietta Lacks even was. I'll try not to bore you with the story because it's going to be a little bit harder to like make jokes because it's really not a joke telling kind of story because it is really intense and dark. But it is certainly not a boring story, that's for sure.

Like I will keep you intrigued every step of the way. There's also a book about her story. So if you're at all interested to learn even more, you should totally listen. Sorry, not listen. You should totally read it. Or listen to an audio book if that's your go-to. But I certainly won't have any difficulty keeping this interesting and keeping you on your toes the entire time. But I would like to start out by just talking about who Henrietta Lacks was.

So Henrietta did leave a lasting impact on modern medicine. But really, who was she outside of just herself and being a science experiment? Now, obviously, when people hear Henrietta Lacks' name, if they do know a little bit about her, then they usually just think of science, which is totally fair. But she did have a life outside of this. Her story begins in a very different place than where she ended up. She grew up in a setting of rural poverty, basically.

Early 1920s, American. Her family was known to be pretty resilient. I mean, when you're in a situation of poverty, discrimination, especially in the early 1900s, she grew up in a pretty tightly knit black community. And it was shaped by hardship and joy. They were close because they basically were trauma bonded with each other. Now, Henrietta Lacks wasn't always known by Henrietta Lacks. She was born as Loretta Pleasant on August 1st, 1920, in Clover, Virginia. This area was a small, segregated farming community.

Loretta, or Henrietta's mother, died in 1924 when Henrietta was literally only four years old. And if you know anything about farming communities at the time, they basically had children to help work on the farm. I mean, sure, they had kids because they wanted kids. But most of the time, especially in the early 1900s or even before then, they had kids because they needed extra hands on the farm to help. So she had nine siblings. There were 10 kids in total.

And her mom had just died while she was four years old. And her father just couldn't care for all 10 children. So they were basically split among their relatives. Henrietta was sent to live with her grandfather, Tommy Lacks. Tommy lived in a log cabin that had once been a slave quarters on a former plantation. She also shared that home with her cousin, David Day Lacks, which, fun fact, later ended up becoming her husband, which was not uncommon at the time.

But, I mean, she was in close quarters with this person all the time. It doesn't make – like, it makes sense why it happened. It was just the time period. It's hard to explain. But anyways, she left school around 6th or 7th grade, 6th, 7th, whatever. And she worked on tobacco fields from a very young age. After leaving her father, the community that she grew up in was centralized around church and kinship. And her upbringing influenced her personality over the years.

A lot of people said that she was known to be resilient, outgoing. She had a deeply rooted family life, which I think is already pretty obvious. Now, when I say she was a young mother, Henrietta had her first child, Lawrence, at 14 years old with Day Lacks, which was her, you know, husband. And they actually weren't even married yet. And then she gave birth to her second child, Elsie Lacks, before marrying Day Lacks as well. So she had two kids before she got married to him.

Now, Elsie had developmental disabilities and epilepsy. And because of this, she was later institutionalized, but the institution conditions were terrible. Now, her daughter may have been in an institution, and Henrietta visited when she could. But it was really difficult for her, especially because of transportation, systemic barriers, distance. It made it just really difficult to go and visit Elsie. And it may sound really bad, but we do have to consider there was this emotional weight that she carried as a mother.