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

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of illness.

Green’s book contributes to a long tradition of literature that examines the human relationship to illness. This genre broadly traces how human civilization has responded to the challenge of illness, which speaks to humanity’s resilience but also underscores the great effort required to overcome this challenge.

Unlike technical literature, which requires medical expertise to understand insights, these books are written for a general audience, enabling wider understanding of human illness. An adjacent example to Green’s work is the 2010 book The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee. Mukherjee traces the earliest recorded accounts of people who experienced cancer in Ancient Egypt, building his way to the 19th-century medical advancements that led to cancer treatments. Mukherjee also relates his experience as a medical professional, mirroring Green’s approach to tuberculosis (TB) as both a historical phenomenon and a personal experience.

As Green states, TB is an evergreen topic because of its protracted history and universality. Every part of the world has produced some form of TB. Green suggests reading Phantom Plague: How Tuberculosis Shaped History, a 2022 book by Vidya Krishnan. While similar to Green’s work, it focuses on the TB crisis in India. This provides an adequate point of comparison for Green’s findings, proving that the economic and social challenges that foster the spread of TB aren’t limited to Sierra Leone.

Some literature offers personal narratives that communicate the day-to-day experiences of living with TB. These works can be helpful in driving empathy for those who experience TB while also undoing the stigma that exists around it. Green’s book discusses the life of Gale Perkins, a TB survivor who spent much of her childhood in a sanatorium. Perkins wrote The Baby Cross: A Tuberculosis Survivor’s Memoir, published in 2011. The 2021 book Stigmatized: A Mongolian Girl’s Journey From Stigma & Illness to Empowerment by Handaa Enkh-Amgalan provides solid evidence for Green’s claim that public healthcare and the social determinants of health are deeply intertwined.

Green also describes the romanticization of TB in fiction as an exclusionary technique. Other works, however, use the topic of TB to explore unjust social conditions. In John le Carré’s 2001 novel The Constant Gardener, the plot is driven forward by a pharmaceutical scandal involving unethical anti-TB drug trials in Africa. This book was inspired by a 1996 litigation against Pfizer in Kano, Nigeria. Similarly, Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle explores the working conditions of meatpacking workers in Chicago, Illinois. Although the novel was intended to function as a critique of capitalism, it also drove inadvertent reforms in food safety, as it exposed the spread of TB among workers and cattle. These works show how vicious cycles of cost-effectiveness and profit maximization come at the cost of widespread suffering and death, as Green discusses in Everything Is Tuberculosis.