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

by John Green

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

The Ebola survivor explained to me this was common in Sierra Leone: People come in with a one-year or three-year grant to do this or that, and then at the end of the grant period, they leave with a half-finished project.

“Death is natural. Children dying is natural. None of us actually wants to live in a natural world.”

Tiger got to hunt, Bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder, “Why, why, why?” Tiger got to sleep, Bird got to land; Man got to tell himself he understand.

“If it is terrifying to think that life may be at the mercy of the multiplication of those infinitesimally small creatures, it is also consoling to hope that Science will not always remain powerless before such enemies.”

And this is why I would submit that TB in the twenty-first century is not really caused by a bacteria that we know how to kill. TB in the twenty-first century is really caused by those social determinants of health, which at their core are about human-built systems for extracting and allocating resources. The real cause of contemporary tuberculosis is, for lack of a better term, us.

In 1804, there was nothing James Watt could do to save his son Gregory. In 1930, there was nothing my great-grandfather Charles could do to save his son Stokes. But we no longer live in that world, thanks to the accumulation and dissemination of knowledge about the illness and how to treat it.