Sherman Alexie's The Farm

The odds were against Sherman Alexie on that day in October 1966. Not only was he born a minority, but he was also hydrocephalic. At the age of 6 months, he had a brain operation, but was not expected to live. Though he pulled through, doctors predicted he would be severely mentally retarded. Fortunately, they were wrong, but he did suffer through seizures and wet his bed throughout his childhood ("What" 1).

In the short story “Superman and Me” which was written by Sherman Alexie, details the autobiography of Alexie’s life when he grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation. In the beginning, Alexie introduces his audience with a bundle of information and vigorous conflicts that he had learned to overcome. Alexie’s first confrontation came the very day he was born, when someone discovered “he was born with water in his brain and not expected to survive.” Once Alexie conquered this deadly situation, he discovered this unique passion towards reading. At the age of 3, he became very peculiar about a certain comic book called Superman, and that’s when he opened it up, analyzed it and became deeply affectionate about the power knowledge. Alexie also seemed to pick up this intelligence through his father, as he was one of the only Indians to attend a catholic school, and obtain an education. Alexie’s next additional challenge began the day he started school. He was teased by his classmates, degraded by his teachers and abandoned by his fellow community members all because he’s smart Indian. Also, the author begins to explain how the Indians on the reservation saw failure as this normal thing, they accepted the fact that they weren’t supposed to get a decent education. Alexie seemed to always find a way around diversity even when it looked like the whole world was against him because he didn’t follow the stereotypical “dumb” Indian boy. Peoples arrogance and crude remarks towards him is

After having read the essays by Sherman Alexie and Stephen King, it is fair to say that there are a fair amount of similarities given that the context is different in each. Alexie’s piece was on how the writer saved himself and aims to do so for those around him. While King’s Piece gives advice on the benefits of reading, especially for a writer and doing something one loves. One notion mainly expressed in both essays is one should read as much as possible, whatever is possible, wherever and whenever.

Have you ever been in a situation where you felt like you were the odd one out? In Sherman Alexie’s novel Indian Killer there are many references to the cultures and traditions of Indians and how they are different to others. Alexie also brings up some of the major points of being a true native American and how some are just “wannabes” as he calls them in the novel. He also goes in depth with some struggles of being an Indian and how life is different between Indians and whites. The culture of the Indians in this novel play a major role in the novel as it is how the Indian killer starts killing because of all the racism. Alexie uses many references to

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a true story of a poor, Southern African-American tobacco farmer who died in 1951 at the very young age of 31 years old from cervical cancer. Little did she know that cells harvested from her tumor, which were obtained without her consent have lived on and on and became one of the most important tools in medicine today. Despite Henrietta’s story being full of legal and ethical issues, the story was one filled with success and anguish. Success for science as her cells served as advancement in medical research and development; yet was sorrowful for Henrietta and her family. This story occurred during a time of segregation in the United States, when Henrietta Lacks believed she

The unethical practices against the African-Americans in the U.S. Public Health Service became even more evident when the dreaded “C” word, also known as cancer, struck the body of Henrietta Lacks. After complaining of an invasive pain in her lower abdomen and excessive blood secretion, Henrietta went to the only hospital that treated African Americans with illnesses of that magnitude. At Johns Hopkins Hospital, Howard Jones cut a small sample of Henrietta’s cervix and sent it to the pathology lab. After a few weeks of testing, Henrietta received a call requesting that she return to Hopkins to begin her cancer radiation treatment. During Henrietta’s first radiation treatment, the surgeon on duty Dr. Lawrence Wharton Jr., picked up a sharp knife and began shaving pieces of tissue from her cervix-without receiving patient’s consent.

Doctors were not telling their patients everything and would sugar coat things to make the donation or operation as less scary as posse so they will agree to it. One of the most famous person to get mistreated was Henrietta Lacks or HeLa. She died in her thirties in the mid-nineteenth century but the one thing she and her family had no idea was that scientists and doctors were growing her cells in a laboratory. Henrietta had no idea that her cells were growing in a dish in a laboratory somewhere and that her cells would help change the world by advancing medicine and science for the rest of anyone’s life.(Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.) But there are more than likely millions of cases that ended up like Henrietta but are not as talked about. Patient’s rights is a right that we can not take for granted and make sure people are not taking your tissue without your

Writers write for a reason, they try to tell a story, describe an image or an emotion or an idea. And they do this to share a message. Metaphor is more than a 65 point scrabble word, it’s a decision that an author makes in order to further a message that the author is trying to share. Writing has a point. Both sherman alexie and joy harjo wrote for a reason, in their pieces “ a drug called tradition” and “ the women hanging from the thirteenth floor window” they talk about individuals relationships with their own future and past and the relationships of others.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot is a story about a young African American woman whose cancer cells were taken from her and grown. They became one of the most important tools in medicine. It’s also the story about how her family couldn’t afford health insurance. This book yields a horrifying look on America’s true values: economic status, religion, and discrimination. Poverty stricken people were the subject of discrimination in the United States.

It’s not fair! She’s the most important person in the world and her family is living in poverty. If our mother is so important to science, why can’t we get health insurance?” (Skloot 168). This passage plays such an important role because it demonstrates not only the effects of poverty in the children’s lives, but also the lack of ethics shown by the hospital and its employees. In just this one passage, it embodies a whole series of wrongdoings that this book is centered around. Hopkins unlawfully took Henrietta’s cells, then they became distributed for a profit, a profit the family received no part of. In fact the family didn’t even know the cells were taken until 25 years later. A whole 25 years they had been going without for many medical needs while others were making a profit hand over fist from her cells. Skloot’s book encapsulates this problem and understanding it plays a key role in understanding not only the Lacks children’s anger, but also Skloot’s purpose for writing the book the way she did.

The immortal life of Henrietta is a book in which Skloot, the author talks about the perspectives of the medical history in a black woman with cancer, which provided studies that have helped millions of people with diseases by providing studies and medications for their illnesses. The author seems to mainly focus on raising moral issues that occurred during that time. It is a time in the 1950s when a woman named Henrietta Lacks, gets “treatment” at Johns Hopkins Hospital the only known hospital that would provide treatment and care for African American patients. Henrietta went in search of a treatment for her aggressive form of cervical cancer. To begin, a moral issue arose while she was on the operating table Dr. Gey took a sample of her cancerous cervical tissue without Henrietta’s consent or knowledge. Dr. Gey was a doctor who did studies particularly for cancer in an attempt to create an immortal line of human cells that would eventually lead to a cure for cancer. Less than a year after Henrietta’s diagnosis, Henrietta passed away at age thirty-one. Henrietta’s cells were the first to ever be lab tested and were still growing strongly. Her family in fact, had no idea that a part of her was still alive at John Hopkins Hospital and eventually in hospitals all over. Henrietta’s son in an interview even mentioned that because their mother was Blacks she was not recognized by people. He said it was practically impossible for a

In The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the book depicts what happened when doctors decided to benefit the majority and take advantage of the minority. Henrietta Lacks, an African-American patient at a renowned hospital, went to receive care and during her stay, she was found to have cells that could cure major diseases. The doctors at the hospital became more interested in her cells than her treatment, leading to her untimely death while others benefited, all while not even compensating Lacks or her family (Skloot 280). It is amazing to see the utter lack of regard towards Lacks and her family.

Grand Canyon University. (2015). Theological anthropology and the phenomenology of disease and illness [Lecture note]. Retrieved from https://lc-ugrad1.gcu.edu/learningPlatform/user/users.html?operation=loggedIn#/learningPlatform/loudBooks/loudbooks.html?currentT

The conceptualisation of medicine as an institution of societal control was first theorised by Parsons (1951), and from this stemmed the notion of the deviant termed illness in which the “sick role” was a legitimised condition. The societal reaction and perspective was deemed a pillar of the emerging social construction of disease and conception of the formalised medical model of disease. Concerns surrounding medicalisation fundamentally stem from the fusion of social and medical concerns wherein the lines between the two are gradually blurred and the the social consequences of the proliferation of disease diagnosis that results from such ambiguities of the social medical model.

The first reason why Gandhi’s death was unjustified was because Gandhi wanted only what was best for for his fellow Indians, and his love for his country and its people were what motivated him to do what he did. An example of him wanting what was best for his fellow Indians is Gandhi leading several campaigns in which he intended to make public of what unfortunate situation Indians were in inside their “Country.” This include the protest against the South African government’s refusal to allow for Indians to vote. He was significant to the the founding of the Natal Indian Congress in 1894. This is an organization that became center in 1894 and helped political resistance develop over a seven year period which began in 1906 (All stated in the article, "Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India."). Another example was that in future years, is in 1913, Gandhi negotiated with colonial laborers with Jan Smuts. Smuts was an Afrikaner (Afrikaans-speaking person in South Africa, especially one descended from the Dutch and Huguenot settlers of the 17th century) and a racist who later became colonial secretary after the Boer War. The final decision between the two managed to gain Indians rights by a little (All stated in the article, “The Problem with Purity.”)