Medical Justice in Literature

Ask a man if he wants to live forever.  His initial answer is yes; who wants to die?  In the past several years, literature has begun to retell the lengths individuals may be willing to go in order to stay alive for as long as possible; it asks what the ethical boundaries are in a society that strives to prevent illness and preserve life.  Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go examine how ethical boundaries are crossed in  scientific attempts to preserve life and ask the reader to decide whether these crossed boundaries are justified or not.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is the non-fiction account of an impoverished woman and how her cancerous cervix cells were used for medical research.  Never Let Me Go is the dystopian novel about young English clones whose purpose is to donate their organs to the sick, both works discuss the possible breaching of one’s rights.  Lacks was offered no consent form to sign, allowing her doctor to take her cells similarly, the clones have no say over their futures.  However, Lacks’ cells are taken to advance medical research; her cells help develop a polio vaccine and aid in the success of in-vitro fertilization.  Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy, all clones, are created to put an end to cancer.  If Lacks’ and the clones’ bodies were used to promote the universal good, did the doctors and scientists do anything wrong?

Both works approach the theme of medical injustice differently.  In The Immortal Life, doctors are the antagonists, the ones who have stolen something from the Lacks family, and Lacks and her family are not quite protagonists, but are certainly victims.  In Never Let Me Go, we are never introduced to the doctors or scientists who created the clones and we are never asked to view Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy through the lens of pity.  Ishiguro makes clear that the characters, like Lacks, have been denied something crucial: control over their lives.  So although Henrietta Lacks is supposed to be pitied, the disservice done to her was monetary (her not receiving compensation for her cells), and Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy are not supposed to be pitied, per se, but seen as real people, and their disservice was not having true free will; they could not escape having to die for someone else at some point in their short lives.

Jeremy Bentham, one of the fathers of Utilitarianism (Wikipedia), said, “It is the greatest amount of good to the greatest amount of people which is the measure of right and wrong” (BrainyQuote).  This would appear to be the premise of the doctors’ decisions to remove Lacks’ cells for research and to create clones for their organs.  To them, it was ethical—heroic, even—to save Lacks’ cells and to dictate the fate of Kathy and her friends because their actions help countless other people.  So they overlooked the pain their decision caused the Lacks clan and chose to view the clones as medical martyrs.  And while both authors shun this mindset, neither Skloot nor Ishiguro tell the reader what to believe in so many words….

Skloot chooses a quotation from The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremburg Code by Elie Wiesel to preface The Immortal Life which immediately shows her point of view toward the doctors’ breeching of an ethical boundary.  “We must not see any person as an abstraction.  Instead we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph” (Skloot).  In Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro establishes how differently the clones live compared to normal humans.  For the most part, he makes no comment as to whether their lives are superior or inferior to ours, except for a particular scene in Part Two of the novel.  Ruth is embarrassed by her collection of trinkets she has bought at the sale their school puts on now and then.  She puts all her keepsakes into a bag and gives it to the caretaker of the estate she and her friends are living at, asking him to give it to a consignment shop.  “‘Keffers rummaged in the bag a bit,’” Ruth narrates, “‘he didn’t know what any of it was—why should he?—and he did this laugh and said no shop he knew would want stuff like that’” (Ishiguro, 131).

Even with the authors’ opinions subtly revealed, the answer to the question—did the doctors act unethically—indistinct, and both sides of the issue have strong, valid arguments.  Ask a man if he wants to live forever.  Initially he says yes; who wants to die?  Ask what price he is willing to pay and he hesitates.  Rebecca Skloot’s debut book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go ask us to consider whether the ethical boundaries crossed are justified—if boundaries are crossed at all.  The answer is ultimately left up to the individual reader.

 Photos downloaded from foxsearclight.com.