It’s not an exaggeration to say that tuberculosis became a form of racialized violence. In Canada and the United States, for example, many Indigenous children were removed from their homes and forced to attend residential schools. As early as 1907, experts were sounding the alarm that this project seemed “almost as if the prime conditions for the outbreak of epidemics had been deliberately caused.” The death rate from TB in Canada’s residential schools appears genuinely unprecedented in human history.
page 85, Chapter 9: Not a Person, Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green
Table of Contents
Preamble
Everything is Tuberculosis is the lexi aka newlynova book club pick for the month of November 2025. I think I also heard talk about this book from various other sources since it came out in March 2025. The book is fairly popular and as of right now the Toronto Public Library system has 227 holds with 80 copies available.
I got lucky and was able to bypass the hold system by borrowing a Best Bets copy of the book from my local library branch. Best Bets copies are non-holdable and non-renewable so the copy was still present at my local library and I picked it up last Friday while running my library errand. Just in time before the month ended!
This is my first time reading anything by John Green and the vibe I got going into this is that it was a thoughtful book talking about medical iniquities and the human costs thereof.
Let’s get into it.
The Book
Everything is Tuberculosis is a non-fiction book that starts off by talking about the history of tuberculosis throughout the ages, a disease that has gone by other names – phthisis, consumption, and finally it got its current name by 1900, tuberculosis.
Something like tuberculosis which has been a problem for humans for a long time also becomes part of our culture and in many different ways. John connects the rise of tuberculosis in the 19th and 20th centuries to the increasingly industrialized societies where more people were living and working in crowded spaces.
There was an even a period of time where tuberculosis which was more often referred to as consumption was romanticized as a disease of the great creative, a horrifying corollary to the myth of the suffering artist. Of course, tuberculosis does not discriminate and many a creative mind living during the 19th century was bound to be brought low by the disease.
And because the disease spreads especially well in crowded living and working conditions like slums and poorly ventilated factories, tuberculosis has come to be seen as a disease of poverty, an illness that walks the trails of injustice and inequity that we blazed for it.
page 6, Introduction: Gregory and Stokes, Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green
All of this brings us to the core of the book which is the story of one Henry Reider, who was a young tuberculosis patient at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone, who John Green met in 2019. Through the story of Henry and his treatment, John makes the connection to the structural iniquities in medical care that come from expensive tests and treatments and a poor country that was left devastated by 150 years of extractive British colonization.
But in dozens of countries, treatment either wasn’t available or reached patients only sporadically: From India to Bolivia to Cambodia to Ethiopia, low- and middle-income nations to have TB death rates higher than those seen in the US. before the antibiotic era. In Ethiopia, for instance TB mortality rates in 1990 resembled those in the US. in 1882, the year Robert Koch identified the venomous little atom of M. tuberculosis. It was as if the cure did not exist–because the diseases was where the cure was not, and the cure was where the disease was not.
page 116, Chapter 12: The Cure, Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green
It was not just Sierra Leone where tuberculosis was aided by the sheer violence of colonization and imperialist mindsets. It was here in Canada in the residential school system as well. I did not know this about the residential school system in Canada but it doesn’t surprise me, they were horrific.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that tuberculosis became a form of racialized violence. In Canada and the United States, for example, many Indigenous children were removed from their homes and forced to attend residential schools. As early as 1907, experts were sounding the alarm that this project seemed “almost as if the prime conditions for the outbreak of epidemics had been deliberately caused.” The death rate from TB in Canada’s residential schools appears genuinely unprecedented in human history.
page 85, Chapter 9: Not a Person
The second half of the book is where this book really started to hit me hard. Reading the history of tuberculosis and it is cultural impact across the ages was interesting but it wasn’t particularly emotionally impactful. But reading the story of Henry, his friends and family, the doctor at the Lakka hospital trying to save him is what really got me in tears.
I was initially skeptical that this book was as good as folks kept saying it was. But ultimately, I found that John Green was able to paint a holistic picture of what a disease like tuberculosis does when combined with systemic medical inequities by connecting it to the story of people who suffer from it currently.
The biomedical paradigm has become so powerful in my imagination that it’s easy to forget how inadequate mere medicine can be. Yes, illness is a breakdown, failure, or invasion of the body treated by medical professionals with drugs, surgeries, and other interventions. But it is also a breakdown and failure of our social order, an invasion of injustice. The “social determinants of health” –food insecurity, systemic marginalization, based on race or other identities, unequal access to education, inadequate supplies of clean water, and so on–cannot be viewed independently of the “healthcare system,” because they are essential facets of healthcare.
page 179-180, Chapter 23: The Cause and the Cure
The core thesis of the book which it ends with is that tuberculosis is not just a problem that can be solved by medical intervention. I think the book does a good job of proving this thesis throughout the book.
We cannot address TB only with vaccines and medications. We cannot address it only with comprehensive STP programs. We must also address the root cause of tuberculosis, which is injustice. In a world where everyone can eat, and access healthcare, and be treated humanely, tuberculosis has no chance. Ultimately, we are the cause. ​ ​We must also be the cure.
page 184, Chapter 23: The Cause and the Cure
Conclusions
Everything is Tuberculosis is a reasonably well written book that brings a thoughtful and nuanced approach to the topics of tuberculosis and medical inequities in our current times. It was both informative and emotionally impactful which is a good combination for a non-fiction book.
I don’t think this book is quite “book of the year” material for me and I think perhaps it is a tad overrated but all-in-all it is a good book that I would recommend to anyone looking to add more non-fiction books into their reading diet. I also think that this book will make for a good discussion topic for a book club so I am looking forward to seeing what folks in lexi’s book club say about it.
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