Everything is Tuberculosis

Everything is Tuberculosis 

By John Green  

Crash Course Books, 2025 

Hardcover: $28.00 

Genre: Nonfiction, Science & Technology

Reviewed by Stephen W. Russell, MD  

On a pre-pandemic visit to a hospital in Sierra Lone, a bright-eyed boy named Henry gave novelist John Green a tour through the facility, an experience that would change the course of his writing career. “My son Henry was nine then,” Green wrote, “and this Henry looked about the same age.” But this Henry wasn’t nine. He was seventeen. And he wasn’t the child of a hospital employee. He was a patient suffering the effects of drug-resistant tuberculosis.  

Green has made a career telling young-adult stories of love and loss, grief and resilience. After the blockbuster success of his fourth novel, The Fault in Our Stars, Green realized that his growing notoriety also gave him a platform—and “a loud, if somewhat fickle, megaphone.” Green’s newest work, Everything Is Tuberculosis, uses that platform to tell a non-fictional account of how this persistent disease has impacted human history. It is also the story of how humanity’s modern conception of this disease has affected our understanding of illness.  

Every good story has a villain, a victim, and a hero. Green’s Everything Is Tuberculosis follows that same structure. To modern eyes, the villain seems obvious. Long before the microscopic tubercle was identified, patients were said to have consumption, “a flattering malady” associated with genius, seen among writers and artists who shared “creative aspects of the soul.” In a pre-modern understanding of disease, ennobling aspects of unexplainable illness could be romanticized. But once the germ theory of disease emerged in the late nineteenth century, tuberculosis became “a horror, an invisible contamination proliferating within you and then spreading to anyone near you.” In a testament to its villainy, tuberculosis in this story targets the marginalized, preys on the impoverished, and stigmatizes those infected.  

The victim in this story is Henry. As Green came to understand, the fundamental problem for Henry, and others living with tuberculosis in the twenty-first century, is that “the disease is where the cure is not, and the cure is where the disease is not.” For every promising drug development for tuberculosis, there are factors blocking access. Underfunded healthcare systems, overpriced effective drugs, and society’s structural inequities all press down on the victims of this story. We also see the effects on the victim’s family. Henry’s mom sells her business to pay for his meals and medicines. Henry’s grieving dad, long estranged from his sick son, blames the doctors for failed treatments. He threatens violence. If his son is going to die, he declares, he should at least die at home.      

This sets the stage for the hero. Green’s book bursts with inspirational figures fighting tuberculosis. He highlights individual doctors caring for patients. He spotlights global health organizations, like Partners in Health and Doctors Without Borders, offering dignity to forgotten communities. He focuses on individual activists combining medical advances with a burning desire to conquer tuberculosis.       

Readers soon discover that, as Green writes, the world is inherently more complex than the narrative writers impose on it. But Green streamlines this narrative without sacrificing complexities. The chapters alternate between Henry’s disease, the history of tuberculosis, and society’s understanding of that illness. These threads are woven into the story, braiding narrative strands taut with tension and suspense. Near the end of the book, we learn of Henry’s options for life-saving treatments without access to those cures. 

If Everything Is Tuberculosis is a book about a century’s worth of unmet promises to the world’s most underserved communities, it is also a book about choices. About agency. And about hope.  

At its most fundamental level, Everything Is Tuberculosis is really the story of us. Through the narrative of a dying child, Green finds his voice in a call to advocacy, amplifying it through his newfound megaphone. At the end of the book, one question still remains: will we answer the hero’s call? 

Stephen W. Russell, MD, a native of Alabama, is a Professor of Medicine and a Primary Care Physician at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). He is the author of medical thrillers, including Blood Money and Command and Control, both of which were previous Amazon bestsellers.