Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of illness.

Green’s book contributes to a long tradition of literature that examines the human relationship to illness. This genre broadly traces how human civilization has responded to the challenge of illness, which speaks to humanity’s resilience but also underscores the great effort required to overcome this challenge.

Unlike technical literature, which requires medical expertise to understand insights, these books are written for a general audience, enabling wider understanding of human illness. An adjacent example to Green’s work is the 2010 book The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee. Mukherjee traces the earliest recorded accounts of people who experienced cancer in Ancient Egypt, building his way to the 19th-century medical advancements that led to cancer treatments. Mukherjee also relates his experience as a medical professional, mirroring Green’s approach to tuberculosis (TB) as both a historical phenomenon and a personal experience.

As Green states, TB is an evergreen topic because of its protracted history and universality. Every part of the world has produced some form of TB. Green suggests reading Phantom Plague: How Tuberculosis Shaped History, a 2022 book by Vidya Krishnan.