Everything Is Tuberculosis

This is an emotionally powerful book about the history of a perception of a disease, different parts where it impacted history, and how the western countries refused to bat an eye at it the instant it stopped directly impacting them, except where it could gain them a profit. John Green interweaves these subjects masterfully with the story of a patient the author personally met, in a way that did bring me to tears several times.

I cannot recommend this book enough. Go get it, it is worth it.

Favourite tidbit (heavily paraphrased): "DAMNNNNNN SHAWTY DO BE COUGHING DIFFERENT THO 🥵 🥵 🥵 🥵 🥵 🥵 🥵 😳😳😳😏" -- White People in the 1800s.

I found this fascinating, partly from personal interest as my grandfather specialized in tuberculosis (and in fact went back to China to help the people there, though I suspect part of that was because back then the profession here wasn't so welcoming to Asian Americans but that's another story...), also because, something I learned from this book, TB is still a thing, a really big thing, so a theme of this book is how that can be compared to how we banged out covid vaccines in record time. It's not a very technical book, more pondering about public policy, reminiscent of Tracy Kidder's Mountains Beyond Mountains, which this author cites as a major influence in a very good afterword including other reading, if you want to dig deeper, and we probably should.

Anyone who listened to John Green at all in the past years knows a bit about tuberculosis. Because since he realised that it is everywhere in human history and present, he cannot shut up about it. Now he has beautifully summarised this story in this book. Many of us don't know that tuberculosis is not only currently the deadliest disease on our planet, but italso has been for basically all of human history. We (living in 1st world countries) have just forgotten about it because it stopped being a threat to us ca. 60 to 70 years ago, while poor people keep dying all over the world. John Green managed to make this book a historical as well as medical introduction to the disease, the story of a boy names Henry from Sierra Leone, and a story of inequity and poverty, but also hope and the power of human kindness.