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

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of illness, death, child death, ableism, and racism.

“This is a book about that cure—why we didn’t find it until the 1950s, and why in the decades since discovering the cure, we’ve allowed over 150,000,000 humans to die of tuberculosis. I started writing about TB because I wanted to understand how an illness could quietly shape so much of human history. But along the way, I learned that TB is both a form and expression of injustice. And I learned that how we imagine illness shapes our societies and our priorities.”

In this passage, Green explains what his book is about while also providing the thesis he wants to argue. By exploring the history of tuberculosis (TB) healthcare, he hopes to show how the social response to TB has caused injustice on a massive scale. His emphasis on the death toll of TB drives a sense of urgency around that thesis. This passage also signals that Green’s book will investigate not just medical history but the systems of imagination and value that determine whose lives are protected and whose are neglected.

“To me, it was a disease of history—something that killed depressive nineteenth-century poets, not present-tense humans. But as a friend once told me, ‘Nothing is so privileged as thinking history belongs to the past.’”

The quote reframes privilege not simply as material access but as a way of seeing—a lens that can obscure present suffering when history is imagined as distant or resolved. Green offers his previous misconception of TB, which underscores the fact of his privileged access to healthcare services as an American. This supports his thesis that the way illness is imagined shapes one’s priorities; by imagining TB as an illness of the past, he did not yet see the urgency around the global TB crisis.