I’m convinced that if I take John Green to a department store and pick out a random object, he’ll connect it to tuberculosis like we’re playing a microbiological version of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.
While Green is best known for his acclaimed young adult novels, Everything Is Tuberculosis is not such a radical departure. The book centers on Henry Reider, who wrestled with this insidious disease during his adolescence in Sierra Leone, where a child is one hundred times more likely to perish from it than in the United States. Green puts a lot of heart behind this lung disease, and the fact that this tale is factual jerks the tears more than his most emotive fiction.
Everything is Tuberculosis reveals startling ways how disease shapes society and society shapes disease. Green discusses facets of tuberculosis even I, a microbiologist, was surprised to learn. Tuberculosis was once romanticized—women bleached alabaster by the disease were considered angelically beautiful—until Robert Koch discovered a germ to be the culprit. After education and hygiene drastically reduced transmission among the privileged, tuberculosis was recast as a filthy disease of poverty. Green mentions how whiskers were thought to be Velcro for tuberculosis bacteria, prompting an era of clean-shaven men. And who knew that Arthur Conan Doyle performed his own detective work mythbusting Koch’s dubious tuberculosis cure before creating Sherlock Holmes?
Green explains why everything is tuberculosis to him, but for millions like Henry and his family and his country, tuberculosis is everything. Green calls it a disease of vicious cycles, “an illness of poverty that worsens poverty,” and his gambit is that walking in Henry’s shoes will move us more than bleak statistics.
The thrilling hunt for the microbe causing tuberculosis is also told, but Green’s real thesis is that tuberculosis today is caused by us. Science has long cured the illness, but science cannot cure apathy. In our time, tuberculosis is less about the bacterial pathogen and more about the human pathologies of racism, greed, and ignorance.
Green is rightfully befuddled by our species’ extraordinary ability to devise cures and our equally extraordinary ability to deny them to fellow human beings. George Merck once said, “We try never to forget that medicine is for the people. It is not for the profits.” Green reminds us how far we’ve gone astray: “When markets tell companies it’s more valuable to develop drugs that lengthen eyelashes than to develop drugs that treat malaria or tuberculosis, something is clearly wrong with the incentive structure.”
Tuberculosis is exacerbated because of vicious cycles but, as Green contends, virtuous cycles can be created as well. Just as Henry is now a YouTuber erasing the stigma of tuberculosis and encouraging people to trust their doctors, Green is raising awareness and challenging us: “We can do and be so much for each other.” We can be the generation that finally defeats the oldest contagious disease—we have the way, but do we have the will? Let’s prove Green’s megaphone to be as deadly to Mycobacterium tuberculosis as antibiotics.
