Everything Is Tuberculosis

When you think about deadly diseases, you usually don’t think you’ll want to read a whole book about it and laugh and cry and be angry together with the author and learn a few things along the way and truly enjoy it, but that’s exactly what John Green has done, something pretty incredible and fascinating to read, and I loved it.

So this book is not a medical treatise that describes tuberculosis in depth, no. But it is a book that looks at the history of tuberculosis, at how it’s been discussed and addressed in medical books and literature, at the development of different treatments and medications, and, above all, at how it impacted the western (rich) world and the rest of the world. But the parts I loved the most were his discussions about the perception we have of illness, poverty, disability, difference.

Green explains that « difference » is often perceived in one two ways: either as a stigma (bad, costly, annoying, to be avoided), or as a romanticized heroic persona that we admire and find inspiring. Either way, the « other » is not like everyone else and thus is not allowed to live « within the world » of everyone else. I have experienced these two perceptions on a daily basis all my life and hate both of them, although with different emotions: stigma is stupidity, lack of knowledge, and lack of empathy; the heroic romanticization comes from a need to feel better about one’s life (I am so kind to this poor person!) and a total lack of understanding of the realities of life (lack of choice, pain, otherness, and society’s willful blindness and callousness towards real needs). I find the second attitude way more despicable than the first one.

This is an easy book to read, not an academic or scientific book, but a very human book, with bouts of humour and anger and sadness that are deeply touching and very understandable. Woven throughout the different chapters is the story of a young man from Sierra Leone, Henry, who suffers from tuberculosis, and this makes the information we learn about tuberculosis even more real, more cruel, more incomprehensible. The greed and selfishness of western society, politicians, and pharmaceutical companies are unbelievable and infuriating, and when you finish reading the book, you want to go punch a few people and scream at many others and become a Doctor Without Borders and go save the world, which is what Green wants, of course. Or at least he wants us to realize that we all need to stop ignoring what’s really happening around us, and we have a moral obligation to do what we can to help change things, even if it’s just a little.

It’s a wonderful book!