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

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of illness, death, ableism, antigay bias, gender discrimination, and racism.

While the book covers the global spread of tuberculosis (TB), Green also makes the root causes of the crisis the subject of his critique. These causes emerge from a psychological interpretation to illness, which influences the sociological response to such conditions. In Green’s assessment, the underlying cause for the TB crisis is bias, which manifests through forms of exclusion such as stigmatization and romanticization.

Green shows how the TB crisis has been used to complement the exclusion of marginalized communities on various bases of identity, specifically race, gender, and class. Before rich white communities had a clearer understanding of the science behind infection and illness, they tried to frame TB as an affliction exclusive to their community. Other communities, like Black and Indigenous communities, were said to have suffered from an entirely different disease that went unnamed on purpose. Green points out, “Acknowledging that consumption was common among enslaved, colonized, and marginalized people would have undermined not just a theory of disease, but also the project of colonialism itself” (74).