Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection
by John Green
View on GoodreadsJohn Green's narrative history of tuberculosis, braiding the disease's social and scientific past with the present-day story of Henry Reider, a young patient Green met in Sierra Leone — arguing that TB endures as the world's deadliest infection not for biological reasons but because of poverty, inequity, and human choice.
Core ideas
- Green's central, deliberately provocative claim is that tuberculosis is no longer fundamentally a biological problem but a human one: it is curable and preventable, yet remains the world's deadliest infectious disease because of how we have chosen to distribute treatment — "that's the world we are currently choosing."
- The book braids the social history of TB — once romanticized as a refined malady of poets and beauty, now stigmatized as a disease of poverty — to show how the meaning a society assigns an illness shapes who lives and who dies from it.
- Its method is moral and personal: Green uses one patient, Henry Reider in Sierra Leone, to make a vast structural problem legible, arguing "we can do and be so much for each other — but only when we see one another in our full humanity," and turning that into concrete advocacy (the bedaquiline pricing fight).
Published2025
Pages208
ISBN9780525556572
ReadJun 2026
