Chapter 1: The Exam
Conflicting dates have been reported for Henrietta’s first visit to Johns Hopkins; the date most
commonly cited is February 1, 1951. The lack of clarity surrounding the date results from a
transcription error noted by her doctor on February 5. Elsewhere her records indicate that her
tumor was first tested on January 29, so I have used that date.
For documentation of the history of Johns Hopkins (in this and later chapters), see the
AMCMA, as well as The Johns Hopkins Hospital and the Johns Hopkins University School of
Medicine: A Chronicle, by Alan Mason Chesney, and The First 100 Years: Department of
Gynecology and Obstetrics, the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, the Johns Hopkins Hos-
pital, edited by Timothy R. B. Johnson, John A. Rock, and J. Donald Woodruff.
Information here and in later chapters regarding segregation at Johns Hopkins came from
interviews as well as from Louise Cavagnaro, “The Way We Were,” Dome 55, no. 7
(September 2004), available at hopkinsmedicine.org/dome/0409/featurei.cfm; Louise Cavag-
naro, “A History of Segregation and Desegregation at The Johns Hopkins Medical Institu-
tions,” unpublished manuscript (1989) at the AMCMA; and “The Racial Record of Johns Hop-
kins University,” Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 25 (Autumn 1999).
Sources on the effects segregation had on health-care delivery and outcomes include:
The Strange Career of Jim Crow, by C. Vann Woodward; P. Preston Reynolds and Raymond
Bernard, “Consequences of Racial Segregation,” American Catholic Sociological Review 10,
no. 2 (June 1949); Albert W Dent, “Hospital Services and Facilities Available to Negroes in
the United States,” Journal of Negro Education 18, no. 3 (Summer 1949); Alfred Yankauer Jr.,
“The Relationship of Fetal and Infant Mortality to Residential Segregation: An Inquiry into So-
cial Epidemiology,” American Sociological Review 15, no. 5 (October 1950); and “Hospitals
and Civil Rights, 1945–1963: The Case of Simkins v. Moses H. Cone Memorial Hospital,” An-
nals of Internal Medicine 126, no. 11 (June 1, 1997).
Henrietta’s medical records, provided to me by her family, are not publicly available, but
some information on her diagnosis can be found in Howard W. Jones, “Record of the First
Physician to see Henrietta Lacks at the Johns Hopkins Hospital: History of the Beginning of
the HeLa Cell Line,” American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology 176, no. 6 (June 1997):
S227-S228.