Nataliya's Reviews > Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

Tuberculosis feels like it should be a disease of the past; the disease that many people in the richer parts of the world know very little about. And yet it’s still widespread and just as lethal — it’s just that some of us can have the luxury to be ignorant about it, be protected from it and have access to effective (and expensive) treatments.

But not everyone in the world can afford the luxury of not caring that tuberculosis exists.

And so I think the best thing of John Green’s impassioned (and yes, perhaps indeed a bit obsessive) book about tuberculosis is that his platform allows him to bring some awareness of it to those who otherwise are lucky not to have to be exposed to the knowledge and effects of it.

John Green is not a doctor, and this is not a medical book. There’s a bit of medical information and fascinating tidbits on the history of tuberculosis and its perception and influence on the culture and society through the ages, but mostly his story of tuberculosis is filtered through the perception of a layperson, focusing on social and socioeconomic angle of the disease, on the story of a young sufferer of the disease - Henry Reider whom he met on the visit to Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone, on the injustices he sees in the system and access to care and treatment. Green is appalled that access to miraculously lifesaving treatment depends on the lottery of which country you happened to be born in. It’s curable, and yet millions of people die from it still.

Saving lives is not a quite cost-effective, it seems.

“[…] The cure is where the disease is not, and the disease is where the cure is not.”

Since I am already familiar with tuberculosis as a disease, however, I was more fascinated by the history of tuberculosis as it reverberated through our culture. The ever-present consumption of the pre-antibiotic literature, the “white plague” that referred to deathly pallor of the victims. The idealized view of tuberculosis sufferer - thin, pale white, with bright cheeks and giant eyes, physically weak but also obligatorily artistic, dying young and beautiful — that is quite a romanticization of a horrible illness that nevertheless persisted in the culture. And then the swing to the opposite once the cause of TB was discovered to be bacterial in nature — the severe stigmatization of the disease, something too shameful to admit, something associated with poverty and poor hygiene. The culture swung from romanticization to vilification of the victims, and both approaches are terrible. And so are staggering health disparities that Green spotlights.

A person who is fortunate enough not to know much about tuberculosis will learn a lot by the end, and Greene’s impassioned narration makes it feel personal — and whether you like it or not is up to you. It’s designed to make you care and make you interested in learning more, and if it succeeds in that then it’s done its job.

4 stars.

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Also posted on my blog.