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

by John Green

Anyone can get tuberculosis—in fact, between one-quarter and one-third of all living humans have been infected with it. In most people, the infection will lie dormant for a lifetime. But up to 10 percent of the infected will eventually become sick, a phenomenon we call “active TB.”

My wife, Sarah, often jokes that in my mind everything is about tuberculosis, and tuberculosis is about everything. She’s right.

But as a friend once told me, “Nothing is so privileged as thinking history belongs to the past.”

It’s fascinating to see the places where TB intersects with history, but there’s risk in claiming that, for instance, Princip’s consumption caused World War I, or that TB made New Mexico a state, and so on. Looking at history through any single lens creates distortions, because history is too complex for any one way of looking to suffice.

Breath is life—respiration is the most visible and irrefutable sign that we are still here. To inspire is to breathe in; to expire is to breathe all the way out.

Gale survived. She married, had three kids, and led the occupational therapy unit at a small hospital. She was also able to pursue a passion she first discovered at the Lakeside Sanatorium trying to cheer up the other kids with TB by making silly faces: She became a clown.

Dr. Girum later told me, “Yes, I know, it’s just one patient. There are so many patients, and Henry is just one. Why should we move mountains to save one patient? Because he is one person. A person, you understand? And anyway, what if he can be the first of many?”