John Green is a vlogger, award-winning novelist, environmentalist, and advocate for global health through his support of the international non-profit Partners in Health. He went to Sierra Leone to investigate the high maternal mortality rates in that country. In a hospital there, he met Henry Reider, a teenager whose tuberculosis had so hampered his growth that he seemed like a small child. Green was deflected into a deep friendship with Henry and an exploration of tuberculosis.
Henry’s severe illness and his difficulties accessing treatment prompted Green to contemplate the horrifying statistics of tuberculosis and the paradox of our extensive knowledge about it. More than one million people still die every year from this ancient disease; yet the bacterial cause was elucidated a century and a half ago, and effective treatments have been around since the 1950s. Barring eradication, the germs mutate and become resistant. Given dire living conditions, it spreads. Effective therapy can be prohibitively expensive. “The cure is where the disease is not, and the disease is where the cure is not” (p. 5). People die where cures cannot be obtained.
History is woven though Henry’s story, but so are politics, culture, and economics: the discoveries, the 19th-century romanticization of ‘wasting away,’ the hard realities of pharmaceutical development and delivery. Henry has survived, become healthy and an inveterate TikToker and youtuber. He even has an episode on the power of storytelling. But other people that we encounter through this tale have died.
We still have tuberculosis because statistics de-personify it, and geography allows ignoring it. Green uses Henry’s story to invite us to ‘[t]hink about how rare and precious humans are, and how many of them you get to worry for and care about. Then if you can, find a way to multiply that 1,250,000 times’ (p. 189).
The book flows easily in language that is clear and accessible, a tribute to Green’s experience in writing young-adult fiction. In the end, without denying the benefits of medical interventions, he calls for a focus on the real cause of tuberculosis: injustice—tolerated and unchallenged. ‘Ultimately,’ he writes, ‘we are the cause’ (p. 184).
Everything is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection
John Green
New York: Penguin/Crash Course Books
2025
ISBN 9780525556572
Web image created by Medhum.org
