Her dark materials

摘要

This moving book, which was published in America in February and is now coming out in Britain, intertwines two stories, one of a personal tragedy, the other of an epoch in modern medicine. Both start in 1951, with the death from cervical cancer of 31-year-old Henrietta Lacks, a poor black tobacco farmer living in rural Maryland. She was treated at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, pretty well by the standards of the day. But by the end her sufferings were horrible, her abdomen badly burnt by the radiation treatment, thernpain from her multiplying tumours far beyond the reach of morphine.