The female physician who popularised the Pap smear [View all]

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20201012-helen-dickens-the-gynaecologist-who-fought-for-black-women

"The daughter of a former slave, Helen Octavia Dickens empowered teen mothers and pioneered the popularity of the Pap smear, helping to save hundreds of lives.
I
In 1951, a 31-year-old mother-of-five walked into Maryland’s Johns Hopkins Hospital for what she called “a knot on my womb”. The knot, it turned out, was a virulent cancer that had started in her cervix. She would soon die in agony of the disease, then the number one killer of American women.

The woman was Henrietta Lacks, who would one day become known for her unintended contribution to medical science. After her death, scientists would take her cancer cells and reproduce them into perpetuity without her family’s knowledge, using them to investigate diseases from Aids to polio.

If Lacks had been given a Pap smear, she may have survived. Developed a decade earlier, the simple screening tool – named after its creator, Greek gynaecologist George “Pap” Papanicolaou – was the newest and most promising technology in early cancer detection. It rose to become the gold standard in cancer screening, and would be instrumental in slashing cervical cancer rates by 70% over the next half century."