Jade Goody Dies from Cervical Cancer : Culture Dish

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Rebecca Skloot is an award-winning science writer, and a contributing editor at Popular Science magazine; she's worked as a correspondent for the NPR show RadioLab, and PBS Nova ScienceNOW. Her writing appears in The New York Times Magazine, O: The Oprah Magazine, Discover and others. She teaches in the University of Memphis's creative writing program. Her first book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, is forthcoming from Crown on February 2, 2010. It tells the story of HeLa -- the first immortal human cell line ever grown in culture (pictured in the blog's banner) -- the woman those cells came from, and the family she left behind. Click Welcome to Culture Dish for an introduction to this blog and its author.

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Jade Goody Dies from Cervical Cancer

Category: Cervical Cancer • HPV
Posted on: March 22, 2009 10:10 AM, by Rebecca Skloot

Not long ago, I posted about the fact that the world was obsessed with Jade Goody's cancer, but not talking about the real story behind her diagnosis. Today, news hit that she has died. Unfortunately, this story brought out the worst in many people right to the end.

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Comments

judging by the medical after shock of Goody's passing, it sounds like she might have inadvertently made a huge difference for cancer prevention in the U.K.

Posted by: coffee maker | March 22, 2009 4:55 PM

Here's my take, others might see it differently.

Jade Goody is an unusual case publicity-wise: she was mocked nastily during her first appearance on the Big Brother reality show, then reviled after the race-related row with Shilpa Shetty on the Celebrity Big Brother show, so she became a popular hate figure and target for abuse.

Then she gets cervical cancer and is Big and Brave and Noble and so on, so the public feels bad about being horrible to someone who is being So Good and So Caring.

And that's broadly what happened with Princess Diana - someone who had been a target for mockery suffers a tragedy and people feel mean about it and over-compensate.

And the point is: it's nothing to do with cancer. As long as it was something not seen as self-inflicted, she would have been just as Wonderful.

Cancer issues aside, I do hope it will make a few more people think twice more before being horrible about figures in the public eye, and that they might realise that we are all human beings underneath.

Posted by: Sam C | March 22, 2009 5:40 PM

People invariably envisage celebrities as something other than human--sometimes as superhuman, sometimes (as in this case) as subhuman. The same people who would never say that kind of nasty crap about someone in their immediate sphere of activity--even someone they saw as racist or otherwise substandard--have no compunction about organizing and participating in hate sites like the one mentioned in your link. This is the absolute worst of human nature and is remarkably consistent across "advanced" societies.

Posted by: kemibe | March 26, 2009 12:55 AM

"Here's my take, others might see it differently.

"Jade Goody is an unusual case publicity-wise: she was mocked nastily during her first appearance on the Big Brother reality show, then reviled after the race-related row with Shilpa Shetty on the Celebrity Big Brother show, so she became a popular hate figure and target for abuse..."

Wasn't there another factor in here?

"...Then she gets cervical cancer and is Big and Brave and Noble and so on, so the public feels bad about being horrible to someone who is being So Good and So Caring."

I heard that after Celebrity Big Brother and before she got the diagnosis she moved in with Shetty and the other contestants for a season of Big Boss, India's counterpart of Big Brother, and left when her doctor sent her the diagnosis news:

http://us.rediff.com/movies/2008/aug/19goody.htm

Posted by: Linda | April 30, 2009 9:39 PM