Bringer Of Books’s Reviews > Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection > Status Update

“And so even after we understood that TB was an infection, we continued to blame it on the sufferer, but with a radically racialized and stigmatic lens that caused more harm to the ill than even pervious forms of stigma.”

“In fact, Henry fit all the ideals of the consumptive- the wide eyes, the visible cheekbones, and the creative temperament. He wrote beautiful poems, and his interest in writing blossomed during his illness. He was pre naturally brilliant and deeply sensitive, expressing emotions of yearning and love in his memoir and poetry. But of course he did not live in the nineteenth century, and he also wasn’t white”

“Imagining something as more human does much the same work as imagining them as less human: Either way, the ill are treated as fundamentally other because the social order is frightened by what their fragility reveals about everyone else’s.”

“But history, alas, is not merely a record of what we do, but also a record of what is done to us.”

“But we cannot save those we love from suffering. This is the story of human history as I understand it- the story of an organism that can do so much, but cannot do what it most wants.”