Health Beyond the Blog: John Green’s “Everything is Tuberculosis”

“Everything is Tuberculosis” is a heart-wrenching reminder of how a curable disease continues to ravage human lives.

by Clara Silvestri

Everything Is Tuberculosis by John Green, published in March 2025, is a history of tuberculosis and an overview of its persistent biomedical, cultural, and social influences on human health and society. Green, who is perhaps best known for his young adult novels such as The Fault in Our Stars and Looking for Alaska, wrote this nonfiction book after meeting a teenage tuberculosis patient named Henry in Sierra Leone in 2019. Green weaves Henry’s personal journey into the informational chapters of the book, showing how our historical interactions with and portrayals of tuberculosis have led up to Henry’s modern-day struggle for equitable care and treatment. 

Expanding on his title, Green demonstrates that nearly every occurrence in human history can be connected to tuberculosis. Events from the start of World War I to the invention of the cowboy hat are used to prove the extent to which tuberculosis has affected our world. One section discusses the romanticization of tuberculosis among Europeans and Americans, another discusses the scientific discovery of the bacteria causing tuberculosis, and the next explains how this discovery was used to completely shift perception of the disease in order to fit racist ideals. 

Green explores how representations of tuberculosis through history have contributed to unequal modern care by examing how treatment is distributed in high-income versus low-income countries. He makes the central claim that “the disease is where the cure is not.” The powerful and emotional story of Henry, combined with other accounts of difficulties of treatment access, lead him to urge that funding tuberculosis research is critical to sustainably eradicating this disease.

Even for readers with no prior science or public health background, Everything is Tuberculosis provides a digestible and compelling reminder of how a curable disease continues to shape and devastate humanity after thousands of years.

Everything is Tuberculosis is available for purchase in bookstores or online.