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

by John Green

colonial infrastructure was not built to strengthen communities; it was built to deplete them.

History is often imagined as a series of events, unfolding one after the other like a sequence of falling dominoes. But most human experiences are processes, not events. Divorce may be an event, but it almost always results from a lengthy process—and the same could be said for birth, or battle, or infection. Similarly, much of what some imagine as dichotomous turns out to be spectral, from neurodivergence to sexuality, and much of what appears to be the work of individuals turns out to be the work of broad collaborations. We love a narrative of the great individual whose life is shot through with major events and who turns out to be either a villain or a hero, but the world is inherently more complex than the narratives we impose upon it, just as the reality of experience is inherently more complex than the language we use to describe that reality.

Why must we treat what are obviously systemic problems as failures of individual morality?

We cannot view “health” absent the “social determinants of health,” or else we end up in situations seen all the time with TB, wherein people are, to cite just one example, unable to take their medicine because they don’t have enough food in their stomach.