by Abbigale Kernya, for The 44 North
Managing Editor
Genre: Non-Fiction
“It reminded me that when we know about suffering, when we are proximal to it, we are capable of extraordinary generosity. We can do and be so much for each other. But only when we see one another in our full humanity. Not as statistics or problems, but as people who deserve to be alive in the world.”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis
“Nothing is so privileged as thinking history belongs to the past.”
Lately, I’ve been thinking about COVID.
But I still skip every episode from whatever TV show in 2020 where a pandemic invades the static screen. I don’t want to talk about it, and yes, I also can’t believe it happened.
Sometimes I’m catapulted five years ago in the smallest of places: Standing on the crusted six-feet-apart footprints scuffed on the grocery store floor, or a blue mask snagged on a trash bin, or even the sharp moment of panic when a stranger sneezes on the bus.
Despite all my shoving and pushing it down into a crevice of my memory, the pandemic still happened, and we are still living through it. I still think about it, even when I don’t want to.
John Green is the first person to untangle my stress ball of past anxiety and future confusion about illness into one tidy book. It fundamentally changed my life. Everything is Tuberculosis follows the illness (or, “consumption,” as it was so often glorified as a beautiful wasting disease of the rich and privileged) through the threads of class and capitalism in the past centuries. Green weaves us through the romanticization of the “white man’s disease” to now, where the raging class disparities around the globe ignite the fire for consumption to not only rage on, but fuel humanitarian crises like gasoline on a brush fire.
What took this book (by no means a solely historical textbook) from a simple Crash Course about disease to a commentary on beauty and capitalism was Green’s account of travelling to Sierra Leone to see first-hand how a disease—that was once considered desirable for its beauty and attraction to upper-class intelligence—is now the beacon for a humanitarian crisis.
In a calling card to end the disparity between the tuberculosis (TB) crisis and access to medication and vaccines, Green details the story of a little boy, Henry, treated in a Sierra Leone hospital. A hospital it may have been, but one much different from the one you and I and John are familiar with. One that is denied access to life-saving medicine. One that is impoverished by colonialism, past and present, and one where children die of an easily curable disease for the sole reason that they were born in a country that the rest of the world turned a blind eye to.
Green details his relationship with Henry throughout the book, from innocent childlike wonder to recounting stories of Henry’s family, where disease and poverty have taken more than just his childhood. Despite the catastrophic humanitarian crisis invading Henry’s lungs, he is hopeful. He is brave, and he fundamentally changes Green’s life.
The othering of the ill is not something special to our tiny pocket in time, but rather a telltale sign of how disease is treated based on class, race, and access to medicine. From belladonna’s use in the 1800s as a cosmetic to mimic the pale, feverish look of consumption, to the vilification of TB when poor marginalized communities fell victim, to the current rise of unnatural thinness that plagues the beauty standard of our post-COVID society. Everything is connected, and everything is curable.
To paraphrase perhaps my favourite line in the entire book: Where there is a humanitarian crisis, you will find TB. Where there is poverty and colonialism and people stuck under the boot of centuries of oppression, you will find TB. This disease does not compromise on its victims; it does not judge or offer plea deals. Instead, we as humans are the sole perpetrators of the thousands and thousands of deaths every year from this entirely curable disease. It is when humans fail to act, or don’t care, or put profit over human lives, that TB will show up.
It is hard for me to briefly explain how much of an impact this book had on not only my relationship to illness, but also how I view the world. Green makes an excellent argument throughout the entire book that there is no reason that humans should die of a disease like TB. There is no logical reason that in a world where humans have gone to space and built electric cars that even one human life dies from an entirely preventable illness. In that case, tuberculosis is not a disease of medicine, but rather a disease of human empathy and the cavern standing between suffering and power.
Everything is Tuberculosis is as gentle with human spirit as it is fundamentally important to understanding the politics of human suffering. From tender-hearted stories of compassion and generosity, to a century-long study into illness as a catalyst for global misunderstanding of what it means to be alive.
