We all know that it was dangerous for black people to ever question a white person about anything; one of the most astounding statements ever was that given by then Chief U.S. Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney who wrote, in the Dred Scott decision, that there were “no rights of a black man that a white man was bound to respect.”

What I learned this week, however, was that black people could not even question a white person, even if that white person was his or her doctor. Henrietta Lacks, the African American woman whose cancerous cells were extracted before she died and have been used in research and experiments ever since, is an example.

Lacks lived in Maryland, which “back in the day” had been a slave state. The so called”Hospital for the Negro Insane” was located south of Baltimore and was later renamed Crownsville State Hospital. Henrietta’s daughter Elsie, was committed to that hospital at an early age because of developmental disabilities.

After being diagnosed with cervical cancer, Lacks seemed to be all right for a while. The standard treatment for treating cancer in those days was the insertion of radium into the cancerous region in one’s body.  Thin glass tubes of radium tucked inside canvas pouches were inserted inside Lacks’ cervix, and several rolls of gauze were put inside of her to keep the tubes in place.

According to Rebecca Skloot, author of “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” the first radium treatment seemed to work; Lacks’ cancer seemed to be gone before the need for a second treatment, but a second treatment was given nonetheless.

But shortly after her second treatment, Lacks began to bleed badly, and it continued for a long time. After a while,  Skloot reports that Lacks felt like something was growing again inside her. She told the doctors that something wasn’t right, but they did not listen to her and in fact wrote on her chart that there was “no evidence of recurrence.”

Skloot said that there was “no indication that Henrietta questioned him; like most patients in the 1950s, she deferred to anything her doctors said …especially black patients in public wards.” In those days, segregation was the law and “black people didn’t question white people’s professional judgement.”

So, in spite of bleeding heavily for over a month and feeling worse and worse, Henrietta simply tried to go on. Skloot writes that back then (as now!) black patients were “treated and hospitalized at later stages of their illnesses … and once hospitalized, got fewer pain medications and had higher mortality rates.”

When Henrietta could no longer take the pain she went to Johns Hopkins Hospital, where she had been originally diagnosed and where she had had her follow-up visits, barely able to walk or to urinate. Doctors X-rayed her and found a huge tumor. It was inoperable.