John Green’s exceptional combination of memoir, medical history and cultural analysis, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection, reveals how tuberculosis has shaped human culture, and illustrates the ways that we understand and treat the disease, and the steps doctors and researchers have taken to eradicate it.
Green traces the history of tuberculosis and the search for a cure from ancient Greece through the early 21st century. Some ancient philosophers held that TB, or phthisis, was inherited, while others thought the illness was contagious. By the end of the 19th century, the germ theory of the disease prevailed, and scientist Robert Koch discovered a test that would confirm a TB diagnosis in patients. In 1921, scientists developed a vaccine for TB. Still, it is the world’s deadliest disease, killing more than 150 million around the world since the 1950s. One million died of TB in 2023 alone, in large part, Green writes, because “the cure is where the disease is not, and the disease is where the cure is not.”
Green deftly weaves the story of Henry, a 17-year-old boy with TB whom Green met at a hospital in Sierra Leone in 2019, into his larger narrative. Emaciated from malnourishment and taking a regimen of TB drugs, Henry remains positive, even though his friends and many of his extended family have abandoned him because of the stigma of tuberculosis in Sierra Leone. When Green first meets Henry, the young man’s case looks hopeless because he doesn’t have access to resources that a TB patient elsewhere might have, namely effective drugs, abundant food and clean water.
“Tuberculosis has come to be seen as a disease of poverty,” writes Green, “an illness that walks the trails of injustice and inequity that we blazed for it.” He briefly shares the history of Sierra Leone, tracing the impacts of colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade to today’s fragile health care system and economic depression. In the end, Henry’s case has a positive outcome, but it illustrates Green’s emphasis throughout the book that the cure for TB is not only in medication but also in allocating resources and health care justly. Everything Is Tuberculosis memorably probes the intersections of medicine and human emotion, while sounding the alarm on this crisis.
