I’ve been reviewing books on this blog for a while now, but Everything is Tuberculosis wasn’t just another title on my list.
Tuberculosis research has quietly become the heartbeat of my work. It’s not just what I study, it’s how I see the world. A lens that colors my understanding of justice, equity, and health. I could not not read this book.
I’m a physician by training.
I stepped away from clinical practice to pursue research and public health, a decision that some of my family and friends still don’t fully understand. In many of the circles I belong to, becoming a doctor is the goal. Anything else? It raises questions. Quiet ones. Loud ones. And a lot of inner conflict.
This book gave me language for what I’ve felt for years.
📖 Goodreads Blurb
John Green, the #1 bestselling author of The Anthropocene Reviewed and a passionate advocate for global healthcare reform, tells a deeply human story illuminating the fight against the world’s deadliest disease.
Tuberculosis has been entwined with humanity for millennia. Once romanticized as a malady of poets, today tuberculosis is a disease of poverty that walks the trails of injustice and inequity we blazed for it.
In 2019, John Green met Henry, a young tuberculosis patient at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone while traveling with Partners in Health. John became fast friends with Henry, a boy with spindly legs and a big, goofy smile. In the years since that first visit to Lakka, Green has become a vocal and dynamic advocate for increased access to treatment and wider awareness of the healthcare inequities that allow this curable, treatable infectious disease to also be the deadliest, killing 1.5 million people every year.
In Everything is Tuberculosis, John tells Henry’s story, woven through with the scientific and social histories of how tuberculosis has shaped our world and how our choices will shape the future of tuberculosis.
🧬 Genre
Non-fiction, Global Health, Narrative Medicine, Medical Humanities
⚠️ Trigger Warnings
🩸 Illness and death
🧍♂️ Healthcare injustice
💔 Systemic neglect
👶 Pediatric illness
🇸🇱 Global health inequity
📚 A Book About TB… But Also About Us
John Green set out to write about tuberculosis.
But what he ended up writing is much more than a medical narrative; it’s a call for empathy, a spotlight on injustice, and a deeply human story.
“The cure is where the disease is not, and the disease is where the cure is not.”
TB is curable. It has been since the 1950s.
So why are we still losing 1.5 million people a year to it?
“How can I accept a world where over a million people will die this year for want of a cure that has existed for nearly a century?”
💡 When you’re surrounded by like-minded people, it’s easy to become a frog in a well. It might be the best well in the world, but it’s still a well.
This book reminded me that empathy isn’t a given. We have to keep choosing it. Over and over again.
As Green puts it:
“Why should we move mountains to save a patient? Because he is ONE PERSON.”
👦 Henry and the Power of One
The data is overwhelming. The numbers are devastating.
But Green doesn’t throw charts at you. He gives you Henry.
“The problem with statistics is I cannot take in that we lose one million two hundred and fifty thousand people each year to a curable illness… but I can just barely fathom Henry.”
He invites you to imagine yourself in his shoes. To remember all you’ve lived through, all who have loved you into being. And then, only then, to multiply that by 1.25 million: people, lives, families.
That’s when the number starts to feel real.
That’s when the urgency stops being theoretical.
TB is still here. Still unjust.
And the reason isn’t science. It’s systems.
“The real cause of contemporary tuberculosis is, for lack of a better term, us.”
📊 Rating Table
| Category | Rating |
|---|---|
| ✍️ Writing | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| 🌍 Setting | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| 💡 Insight | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| 📚 Relevance | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| ⭐ Overall | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
🌟 Final Thoughts
I read this book because TB is at the center of my life’s work.
Because TB quietly changed my life.
But I’m asking you to read it because this isn’t just a book about medicine.
It’s a book about people. About humanity. About the choices we make, and the ones we look away from.
You don’t have to be in public health to care.
You just have to be human.
📣 Read it and feel empathy coursing through your veins.
💥 Read it and understand what fuels our work.
🌎 Read it and know that you, too, can be part of the change.
Read it and pass it on.
Anushka's Bookish Shenanigans 