Everything Is Tuberculosis Quotes

Nothing is so privileged as thinking history belongs to the past.

But as a friend once told me, “Nothing is so privileged as thinking history belongs to the past.

It reminded me, that when we know about suffering, when we are proximal to it, we are capable of extraordinary generosity. We can do and be so much for each other. But only when we see one another in our full humanity. Not as statistics or problems, but as people who deserve to be alive in the world.

We live in between what we choose and what is chosen for us.

And so we have entered a strange era of human history: A preventable, curable infectious disease remains our deadliest. That's the world we are currently choosing.

What's different now from 1804 or 1904 is that tuberculosis is curable, and has been since the mid-1950s. We know how to live in a world without tuberculosis. But we choose not to live in that world.

We are powerful enough to light the world at night, to artificially refrigerate food, to leave Earth’s atmosphere and orbit it from outer space. But we cannot save those we love from suffering. This is the story of human history as I understand it—the story of an organism that can do so much, but cannot do what it most wants.

But history, alas, is not merely a record of what we do, but also a record of what is done to us.

People who are treated as less than fully human by the social order are more susceptible to tuberculosis but it’s not because of their moral codes or choices or genetics, it’s because they are treated as less than fully human by the social order.

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?

On my first day of training, she told me, "Death is natural. Children dying is natural. None of us actually wants to live in a natural world." Treating disease, whether through herbs or magic or drugs, is unnatural. No other animals do it, at least not with anything approaching our sophistication. Hospitals are unnatural. As are novels, and saxophones. None of us actually wants to live in a natural world.

We can do and be so much for each other—but only when we see one another in our full humanity, not as statistics or problems, but as people who deserve to be alive in the world.

Framing illness as even involving morality seems to me a mistake, because of course cancer does not give a shit whether you are a good person. Biology has no moral compass. It does not punish the evil and reward the good. It doesn’t even know about evil and good. Stigma is a way of saying, “You deserved to have this happen,” but implied within the stigma is also, “And I don’t deserve it, so I don’t need to worry about it happening to me.

I’m a novelist, not a historian of medicine. TB is rare where I live. It doesn’t affect me. And that’s all true. But I hear Shreya, and Henry, and so many others calling to me: Marco. Marco. Marco.

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.

We all engage in the punitive act of giving a disease a meaning.

The idea of becoming sick in order to look healthy or beautiful speaks to how profoundly consumptive beauty ideals still shape the world we share.

He loved that word. Who wouldn't? "Encouraged." Like courage is something we rouse ourselves and others into.

...somehow, we always seem to blame the patient for noncompliance, rather than blaming the structures of the social order that make compliance more difficult.

But we can choose a different world. In fact, we will choose a different world. The world will be different a generation from now. The question is whether we will look back in gratitude at the virtuous cycles or in horror at the vicious ones.

But survival is not primarily an act of individual will, of course. It's an act of collective will.

Where are the drugs? The drugs are where the disease is not, and where is the disease? The disease is where the drugs are not.

TB in the twenty-first century is not really caused by a bacteria that we know how to kill. TB in the twenty-first century is really caused by those social determinants of health, which at their core are about human-built systems for extracting and allocating resources. The real cause of contemporary tuberculosis, is for lack of a better term, us.

I want to pause here to note a defining feature of humans, which is that we like to know why things happen, especially when really bad things happen. And if a reason is not immediately apparent, we will find one.

Imagining someone as more than human does much the same work as imagining them as less than human: Either way, the ill are treated as fundamentally other because the social order is frightened by what their frailty reveals about everyone else’s.

And so we must remember that illness is not only a biomedical phenomenon, but also a constructed one, and how we imagine leprosy or OCD or tuberculosis matters.

Why must we treat what are obviously systemic problems as failures of individual morality?

I am an author, and I, for one, am deeply offended by the notion that my "waywardness, peevishness, Irascibility, misanthropy, and murky passions" are caused by a "derangement of bodily health," even as I am impressed by a nineteenth-century magazine's ability to absolutely nail my personality.

Henry is a human being, just as you are a human being. Consider yourself for a moment—everything you’ve overcome, everything you’ve survived. Think of the people who loved you up into your now. Think of how hard school is or was, how you were lucky or blessed to meet people you could love and who could love you. Think about how rare and precious humans are, and how many of them you get to worry for and care about. Then, if you can, find a way to multiply that times 1,250,000. That is why we must work together to end tuberculosis and all other diseases of injustice.

We do not exist primarily to be plugged into cost-benefit analyses. We are here to love and be loved, to understand and be understood.

Framing illness as even involving morality seems to me a mistake, because of course cancer does not give a shit whether you are a good person. Biology has no moral compass. It does not punish the evil and reward the good. It doesn’t even know about evil and good.

Death is natural. Children dying is natural. None of us actually wants to live in a natural world.

In the U.S., entire cities were founded by and for people with tuberculosis, including Pasadena, California, and Colorado Springs, Colorado.

Education is the most important thing,” he told me once. “Not just for me, you know, but also for the nation.

Her optimism flew high, not only for her eventual cure of which she was sure, but for everything that would happen to her henceforth. That too, she knew was a characteristic of the tubercular - the very quality , in fact, which made them such interesting patients.

On the second floor was the office in which Houston pounded an ancient typewriter with two fingers, always setting an example of unceasing hard work for his admiring students. They had no hint of the fact that their hard-driving dean had contracted tuberculosis while serving as a GI in France in Word War I. Houstan always seemed vibrant and impassioned in the chase for justice as he tried to expose his students to everything relating to the law that might give them an advantage. . . . "I never worked hard until I got to the Howard Law School and met Charlie Houston," Marshal told me. "I saw this man's dedication, his vision, his willingness to sacrifice, and I told myself, 'You either shape up or ship out.' When you are being challenged by a great human being, you know that you can't ship out." So Houston rescued Marshall and launched him into a career as one of the greatest lawyers in American history.

because food was not considered to be an essential aspect of tuberculosis treatment, and so there was no funding for food.

Stigma is a way of saying, “You deserved to have this happen,” but implied within the stigma is also, “And I don’t deserve it, so I don’t need to worry about it happening to me.

tuberculosis is listed in Guinness World Records as the oldest contagious disease.

About half of all humans ever died before the age of five.

This year, thousands of doctors will attend to millions of TB patients, and just as my great-grandfather could not save his son, these physicians will be unable to save their patients, because the cure is where the disease is not, and the disease is where the cure is not.

It's tempting to imagine this romanticization as the opposite as the opposite of stigmatization. Rather than discounting people as stigma does, romanticization lifts them up as paragons of beauty or intellect or some other virtue. But really, I see these as complimentary strategies, used to make "the sick" into an "other," a group of people fundamentally distant and different from the rest of the social order. … Imaging someone as more than human does much the same work as imaging them as less than human. Either way, the ill are treated as fundamentally other because the social order is frightened by what their frailty reveals about everyone else's.

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.

I find it interesting that even here, in the supposedly pure world of science, we feel the weight of historical forces pressing in upon discovery. Our desire to create outsiders, the competition for resources among communities that would be better off cooperating, and our long history of warfare all come together in this moment of discovery.

Consumption, after all, was a flattering malady, a genetic disorder enriching the soul even as it slowly destroyed the body. Tuberculosis was a horror, an invisible contamination proliferating within you and then spreading to anyone near you.

It is a mistake to think of the expatriate as someone who abdicates, who withdraws and humbles himself, resigned to his miseries, his outcast state. On a closer look, he turns out to be ambitious, aggressive in his disappointments, his very acrimony qualified by his belligerence. The more we are dispossessed, the more intense our appetites and illusions become. I even discern some relation between misfortune and megalomania. The man who has lost everything preserves as a last resort the hope of glory, or of literary scandal. He consents to abandon everything, except his name. [ . . . ] Let us say a man writes a novel which makes him, overnight, a celebrity. In it he recounts his sufferings. His compatriots in exile envy him: they too have suffered, perhaps more. And the man without a country becomes—or aspires to become—a novelist. The consequence: an accumulation of confusions, an inflation of horrors, of frissons that date. One cannot keep renewing Hell, whose very characteristic is monotony, or the face of exile either. Nothing in literature exasperates a reader so much as The Terrible; in life, it too is tainted with the obvious to rouse our interest. But our author persists; for the time being he buries his novel in a drawer and awaits his hour. The illusion of surprise, of a renown which eludes his grasp but on which he reckons, sustains him; he lives on unreality. Such, however, is the power of this illusion that if, for instance, he works in some factory, it is with the notion of being freed from it one day or another by a fame as sudden as it is inconceivable. * Equally tragic is the case of the poet. Walled up in his own language, he writes for his friends—for ten, for twenty persons at the most. His longing to be read is no less imperious than that of the impoverished novelist. At least he has the advantage over the latter of being able to get his verses published in the little émigré reviews which appear at the cost of almost indecent sacrifices and renunciations. Let us say such a man becomes—transforms himself—into an editor of such a review; to keep his publication alive he risks hunger, abstains from women, buries himself in a windowless room, imposes privations which confound and appall. Tuberculosis and masturbation, that is his fate. No matter how scanty the number of émigrés, they form groups, not to protect their interests but to get up subscriptions, to bleed each other white in order to publish their regrets, their cries, their echoless appeals. One cannot conceive of a more heart rending form of the gratuitous. That they are as good poets as they are bad prose writers is to be accounted for readily enough. Consider the literary production of any "minor" nation which has not been so childish as to make up a past for itself: the abundance of poetry is its most striking characteristic. Prose requires, for its development, a certain rigor, a differentiated social status, and a tradition: it is deliberate, constructed; poetry wells up: it is direct or else totally fabricated; the prerogative of cave men or aesthetes, it flourishes only on the near or far side of civilization, never at the center. Whereas prose demands a premeditated genius and a crystallized language, poetry is perfectly compatible with a barbarous genius and a formless language. To create a literature is to create a prose.

The consumptive poet cannot be in the snow, only lying in the house in the snow. For me, anyway, this way of understanding chronic illness--as being of the world but also no permitted by circumstances or the social order to be entirely WITH the world--is a sentiment applied from within rather than from without, a way of thinking about the limits and opportunities of disability that acknowledges the difference and loss without othering or romanticizing. It's not trustful or loving or soothing or mild. It's true.

child born in Sierra Leone is over one hundred times as likely to die of tuberculosis than a child born in the United States. This difference, as Dr. Joia Mukherjee writes, is “not caused by genetics, biology, or culture. Health inequities are caused by poverty, racism, lack of medical care, and other social forces.

We are powerful enough to light the world at night, to artificially refrigerate food, to leave Earth’s atmosphere and orbit it from outer space. But we cannot save those we love from suffering. This is the story of human history as I understand it—the story of an organism that can do so much, but cannot do what it most wants. —

We are powerful enough to light the world at night, to artificially refrigerate food, to leave Earth's atmosphere and orbit it from outer space. But we cannot save those we love from suffering. This is the story of human history as I understand it- the story of the organism that can do so much, but cannot do what it most wants.

Looking at history through any single lens creates distortions, because history is too complex for any one way of looking to suffice.

In general, colonial infrastructure was not built to strengthen communities; it was built to deplete them.

The reclining wood-slatted chair known as the Adirondack Chair was invented for TB patients, allowing them to rest outdoors without needing their beds wheeled outside.

The beauty of women is greatly owing to their delicacy, or weakness.” One romantic word to describe the beauty standard—delicacy—followed by a stigmatizing one—weakness.

While tuberculin cannot treat TB, it can identify TB, because only those who are infected with M. tuberculosis will have an immune response to tuberculin.

The world is inherently more complex than the narratives we impose upon it

The biomedical paradigm has become so powerful in my imagination that it’s easy to forget how inadequate mere medicine can be.

Tiger got to sleep, and bird got to land, and man got to tell himself he understand.

twentieth-century TB survivors include Beatle Ringo Starr (who was institutionalized with TB as a teenager), the novelist George Orwell (who died of TB in 1950,

In a world where everyone can eat, and access healthcare, and be treated humanely, tuberculosis has no chance. Ultimately, we are the cause.

Tuberculosis is so often, and in so many ways, a disease of vicious cycles: It’s an illness of poverty that worsens poverty. It’s an illness that worsens other illnesses—from HIV to diabetes. It’s an illness of weak healthcare systems that weakens healthcare systems. It’s an illness of malnutrition that worsens malnutrition. And it’s an illness of the stigmatized that worsens stigmatization. In the face of all this, it’s easy to despair. TB doesn’t just flow through the meandering river of injustice; TB broadens and deepens that river.

Is it a patient’s fault if their living conditions, or concomitant diagnoses, or drug use disorder, or unmanaged side effects, or societal stigma result in them abandoning treatment?

To my brother, Hank, who told me not to let his cancer get in the way of my tuberculosis activism: I love you so much. What a privilege it is to be the tail to your extraordinary comet.

The world we share is a product of all the worlds we used to share. For me at least, the history and present of tuberculosis reveal the folly and brilliance and cruelty and compassion of humans.

But of course people are not just their economic productivity. We do not exist primarily to be plugged into cost-benefit analyses. We are here to love and be loved, to understand and be understood.

We chose to destroy the human population because it took us less than three seconds to conclude that humanity is a virus that mutates over time and becomes stronger. Many vaccines have come along to try and cure Earth of humanity. Virtuous pandemics: the plague of Athens, the Black Death, smallpox, cholera, Spanish flu, tuberculosis, malaria, yellow fever, Ebola, Zika, and a thousand more. Humanity survives, adapts, grows stronger, multiplies, and continues to wreak havoc on this planet and all other species that inhabit it. Humans are programmed to mate with partners of differing immune systems so that their offspring can be stronger than them. You seek immortality through evolution, yet you annihilate everything in your path. Humanity is cancer, humanity is bacteria, humanity is disease, and you need to be destroyed.

It was an illness of the breath, of the place where the body interacts with the atmosphere, a process so sacred that the Hebrew word ruach, the Chinese word chi, the English word spirit, and the Inuit word sila all derive from words meaning breath or breathing. Breath is liferespiration is the most visible and irrefutable sign that we are still here. To inspire is to breathe in; to expire is to breathe all the way out.

Prevention strategies saw faster progress. The widespread phenomenon of cows infecting humans with tuberculosis decreased with the advent of tuberculin-based testing of cow herds alongside the pasteurization of milk.

It’s worth pausing to consider what it means in the context of American history and our conceptions of freedom that Black people fighting for the British were far more likely to be emancipated than those fighting for an independent U.S.

Racialized medicine no longer maintained that high rates of consumption among white people was a sign of white superiority; instead, racialized medicine maintained that high rates of consumption among Black people was a sign of white superiority.

There’s even emerging evidence that one’s microbiome may have a relationship with thought itself through the gut-brain information axis, meaning that at least some of my thoughts may belong not to me, but to the microorganisms in my digestive tract.

Framing illness as even involving morality seems to me a mistake, because of course cancer does not give a shit whether you are a good person. Biology has no moral compass. It does not punish the evil and reward the good. It doesn't even know about evil and good.

There were no reflex hammers, those little tools used to test nerve conduction in the knees and elbows, until 1888. There were no otoscopes, the tool that uses light and magnification to visualize the eardrum, until the 1830s. The first stethoscope, an essential tool for listening to the heart and lungs and GI tract, wasn’t developed until 1816. There were also no X-rays (1895) and no blood pressure cuffs (1881), all of which meant there was really no way to see or understand the inside of a human body while the body was still alive.

It is as if a man whose house was infested with rats were to remove the marks of the creatures every morning and expect in that way to get rid of them,” he wrote. Put another way: Tuberculin was in the business of picking up rat shit, not in the business of killing rats.

When we know about suffering, when we are proximal to it, we are capable of extraordinary generosity. We can do so much for each other but only when we see one another in our full humanity, not as statistics or problems, but as people who deserve to be alive in the world.

Everything’s going fine and then, all of a sudden, I’m in despair. As soon as I feel a little joy, something inside me closes up immediately. It’s like an inner flaw; I call it “the survivors’ disease.” It’s not typhus, tuberculosis, or the other diseases that people sometimes caught. It’s a disease that gnaws away at us from within and destroys any feeling of joy. I have been dragging it about with me ever since I spent that time suffering in the camp. This disease never leaves me a moment of joy or carefree happiness; it’s a mood that forever erodes my strength.

Mere despair never tells the whole human story, as much as despair would like to insist otherwise. Hopelessness has the insidious talent of explaining everything: the reason X or Y sucks is that everything sucks, the reason you’re miserable is because misery is the correct response to the world as we find it, and so on. I am prone to despair, and so I know its powerful voice; it just doesn’t happen to be true. Here’s the truth as I see it: Vicious cycles are common. Injustice and unfairness permeate every aspect of human life. But virtuous cycles are also possible.

Conan Doyle immediately saw what Koch did not: that the serum tuberculin caused a strong immune response in people who’d been infected by TB, but that this immune response did not improve the body’s ability to fight off the disease. As a result, tuberculin often made TB patients more sick, not less.

A child born in Sierra Leone is over one hundred times as likely to die of tuberculosis than a child born in the United States. This difference, as Dr. Joia Mukherjee writes, is “not caused by genetics, biology, or culture. Health inequities are caused by poverty, racism, lack of medical care, and other social forces.

Instead, we could invest more public and philanthropic money into research and development of drugs, vaccines, and treatment distribution systems. We could reimagine the allocation of global healthcare resources to better align them with the burden of global suffering—rewarding treatments that save or improve lives rather than treatments that the rich can afford.

On my first day of training, she said he told me, "Death is natural. Children dying is natural. None of us actually wants to live in a natural world." Treating disease, whether through herbs or magic or drugs, is unnatural. No other animals do it, at least not with anything approaching our sophistication. Hospitals are unnatural. As are novels, and saxophones. None of us actually wants to live in a natural world.

And so here is Shreya, saying “Polo” to me from across the great divide. But she is also saying “Marco.” She is also telling me to hear her voice, and answer her call. People often ask me why I’m obsessed with tuberculosis. I’m a novelist, not a historian of medicine. TB is rare where I live. It doesn’t affect me. And that’s all true. But I hear Shreya, and Henry, and so many others calling to me: Marco. Marco. Marco.

At this time, there was a superstition among upper class women that the blood of young children helped keep the bloom of youth and that young fat helped conserve a young skin. There was also TB raging through the city; at that time, it was a disease that was one hundred percent fatal, as in those years there was no penicillin, but there was a popular belief that ingested human blood soothed and healed tuberculosis. Enriqueta now began kidnapping children of all ages, some for prostitution and some to be killed to create her healing tonics and “facial crèmes.” Everything that she possibly could she used from these children: the blood, bones (that she pounded into powder), and the fat.

I should acknowledge, I guess, that one reason I'm interested in TB is that I have obsessive-compulsive disorder, and my particular obsessive worries tend to circle around microbes and illness. Before the germ theory of disease, we did not know that around half the cells in my body do not, in fact, belong to my body - they are bacteria and other microscopic organisms colonizing me. And to one degree or another, these microorganisms can also control the body - shaping the body's contours by making it gain or lose weight, sickening the body, killing the body. There's even emerging evidence that one's microbiome may have a relationship with thought itself through the gut-brain information axis, meaning that at least some of my thoughts may belong not to me, but to the microorganisms in my digestive tract. Research indicates that certain gut microbiomes are associated with major depression and anxiety disorders; in fact, it's possible that my particular microbiome is at least partly responsible for my OCD, meaning that the microbes are the reason I am so deeply afraid of microbes.

But it is just as useless for a man to want first of all to decide the externals and after that the fundamentals as it is for a cosmic body, thinking to form itself, first of all to decide the nature of its surface, to what bodies it should turn its light, to which its dark side, without first letting the harmony of centrifugal and centripetal forces realize [*realisere*] its existence [*Existents*] and letting the rest come of itself. One must learn first to know himself before knowing anything else (γνῶθι σε αυτόν). Not until a man has inwardly understood himself and then sees the course he is to take does his life gain peace and meaning; only then is he free of the irksome, sinister traveling companion―that irony of life which manifests itself in the sphere of knowledge and invites true knowing to begin with a not-knowing (Socrates), just as God created the world from nothing. But in the waters of morality it is especially at home to those who still have not entered the tradewinds of virtue. Here it tumbles a person about in a horrible way, for a time lets him feel happy and content in his resolve to go ahead along the right path, then hurls him into the abyss of despair. Often it lulls a man to sleep with the thought, "After all, things cannot be otherwise," only to awaken him suddenly to a rigorous interrogation. Frequently it seems to let a veil of forgetfulness fall over the past, only to make every single trifle appear in a strong light again. When he struggles along the right path, rejoicing in having overcome temptation's power, there may come at almost the same time, right on the heels of perfect victory, an apparently insignificant external circumstance which pushes him down, like Sisyphus, from the height of the crag. Often when a person has concentrated on something, a minor external circumstance arises which destroys everything. (As in the case of a man who, weary of life, is about to throw himself into the Thames and at the crucial moment is halted by the sting of a mosquito). Frequently a person feels his very best when the illness is the worst, as in tuberculosis. In vain he tries to resist it but he has not sufficient strength, and it is no help to him that he has gone through the same thing many times; the kind of practice acquired in this way does not apply here. Just as no one who has been taught a great deal about swimming is able to keep afloat in a storm, but only the man who is intensely convinced and has experiences that he is actually lighter than water, so a person who lacks this inward point of poise is unable to keep afloat in life's storms.―Only when a man has understood himself in this way is he able to maintain an independent existence and thus avoid surrendering his own I. How often we see (in a period when we extol that Greek historian because he knows how to appropriate an unfamiliar style so delusively like the original author's, instead of censuring him, since the first prize always goes to an author for having his own style―that is, a mode of expression and presentation qualified by his own individuality)―how often we see people who either out of mental-spiritual laziness live on the crumbs that fall from another's table or for more egotistical reasons seek to identify themselves with others, until eventually they believe it all, just like the liar through frequent repetition of his stories.

Our historical overview has focused on northern Europe and the U.S., where consumption was considered inherited for most of the nineteenth century, but that certainly wasn’t the case everywhere. Rates of phthisis appear to have been lower, for example, in China, where Daoist physicians argued the disease was infectious beginning in the twelfth century CE. Consumption was rarer in southern Europe as well, where the illness was also understood to be infectious. As the writer George Sand tried to find a place for consumptive Frédéric Chopin to stay in Spain, Sand wrote a friend, “Phthisis is scarce in these climates and is regarded as contagious.” But of course phthisis was scarce in those climates precisely because it was regarded as contagious. “We went to take residence in the disaffected monastery of Valdemosa,” Sand goes on, “…but could not secure any servants, as no one wants to work for a phthisie…. We begged of our acquaintances that they give us some help…a carriage to take us to Palma from where we wanted to take a ship back home. But even this was refused us, although our friends all had carriages and wealth.

The fact is that what scientists call zoonotic disease was little known in the Americas. By contrast, swine, mainstays of European agriculture, transmit anthrax, brucellosis, leptospirosis, trichinosis, and tuberculosis. Pigs breed exuberantly and can pass diseases to deer and turkeys, which then can infect people. Only a few of De Soto’s pigs would have had to wander off to contaminate the forest. The calamity wreaked by the De Soto expedition, Ramenofsky and Galloway argued, extended across the whole Southeast. The societies of the Caddo, on the Texas-Arkansas border, and the Coosa, in western Georgia, both disintegrated soon after. The Caddo had a taste for monumental architecture: public plazas, ceremonial platforms, mausoleums. After De Soto’s army left the Caddo stopped erecting community centers and began digging community cemeteries. Between the visits of De Soto and La Salle, according to Timothy K. Perttula, an archaeological consultant in Austin, Texas, the Caddoan population fell from about 200,000 to about 8,500—a drop of nearly 96 percent. In the eighteenth century, the tally shrank further, to 1,400. An equivalent loss today would reduce the population of New York City to 56,000, not enough to fill Yankee Stadium. “That’s one reason whites think of Indians as nomadic hunters,” Russell Thornton, an anthropologist at the University of California at Los Angeles, said to me. “Everything else—all the heavily populated urbanized societies—was wiped out.

In the late 1940s, the writer Albert Camus, suffering a bout of tuberculosis, journeyed from war-ravaged Paris to seek warmth and solace in his birthplace of northern Algeria. In a gray, rainy December, he found everything had changed and bitterly recognized the folly of hoping to relive his younger days. And yet he realized that the warm joy of his youth lay still untouched in his memory, writing, “In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me is an invincible summer.

Creeping Charlie was the real rock star, though, according to Dad. It thrived in the shade on the edge of forests and sometimes on rocky soil, and the world saw it as a greedy invader. They didn't know, Dad said, that creeping Charlie was a jack-of-all-trades. It kept soil from sliding, sure, but also its dry leaves could be made into a tea that was great for colds and coughs. Eaten fresh or boiled, the leaves were a delicious source of vitamin C. But that was just the start. Creeping Charlie, and most ground ivy, was magic. It had strong antibacterial properties, rid the body of excess mucus, was an astringent and diuretic, could be turned into a balm that sped up healing, and treated everything from tuberculosis to tumors to tinnitus.

I am N!ai. When the white people first came, I was already a young woman with breasts. Before the white people came, we did what our hearts wanted. We lived in different places, far apart, and when our hearts wanted to travel, we traveled. We were not poor; we had everything we could carry. No one told us what to do. Now the white people tell us to stay in this place. There are too many people. There’s no food to gather. Game is far away, and people are dying of tuberculosis. But when I was a little girl, we left sickness behind us when we moved.

I am N!ai. When the white people first came, I was already a young woman with breasts. Before the white people came, we did what our hearts wanted. We lived in different places, far apart, and when our hearts wanted to travel, we travelled. We were not poor; we had everything we could carry. No one told us what to do. Now the white people tell us to stay in this place. There are too many people. There’s no food to gather. Game is far away, and people are dying of tuberculosis. But when I was a little girl, we left sickness behind us when we moved.

The next day I was driven down to New York City to take the physical. It was one of the strangest things I’d ever seen. Several hundred young men, maybe even a thousand, in their skivvies, walking around an enormous room, all of us lost, dazed, and confused. Some of these guys had dodged the draft and were there under the watchful eyes of dozens of federal marshals lined up against one of the walls. After eight hours of being poked, prodded, stuck, and poked again, I was given a large red envelope. I had been rejected. I had the respiratory problems of an old man, high blood pressure, partial loss of hearing, very bad teeth, very flat, very wide feet and I tested positive for tuberculosis. “Frankly,” the doctor said, “I don’t know how the hell you’re even standing up,” and that was when the sergeant told me that if they bottled everything that was wrong with me “we could take over the world without a shot.

There I learned that one can forget almost everything in life, beginning with bad smells, and that if there was one thing I aspired to, it was not to die in a place like that. In the low hours—which were most hours—I told myself that if anything was going to get me out of there before an outbreak of tuberculosis did the job, it was literature, and if that pricked anyone’s soul, or their balls, they could scratch them with a brick.

We live in between what we choose and what is chosen for us. from Everything is Tuberculosis, pg 162

We see here that the racist dehumanization of African people is not only part of nineteenth and twentieth century history. Racism continues to distort our policies and practices. And just as with previous examples of racism, it proved to be totally false. In point of fact, a 2007 study found that Africans were more likely to adhere to HIV/AIDS treatment regimens than North Americans.

When we know about suffering, when we are proximal to it, we are capable of extraordinary generosity. We can do and be so much better for each other - but only when we see one another in our full humanity, not as statistics or problems, but as people who deserve to be alive in thee world.

There's something about the candle snuffed out prematurely that captures our imagination—it is the thought, perhaps, of the books and paintings and songs that might've been, or the idea that artists simply burn too bright for this world.

I am an author, and I, for one, am deeply offended by the notion that my "waywardness, peevishness, eracibility, misanthropy, and murky passions" are caused by a "derangement of bodily health," even as I am impressed by a nineteenth-century magazine's ability to absolutely nail my personality.

Why must we treat what are obiously systemic problems as failures of individual morality?

A 2023 paper in the Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis (there's a journal for everything) calculated an even higher return, finding that every dollar invested in TB yields 46 US dollars in benefits. The report also found that between 2023 and 2050, there could be almost one million averted deaths per year on average. Interventions to address TB represent exceptional value for money. But of course, people are not just their economic productivity. We do not exist primarily to be plugged into cost-benefit analyses. We are here to love and be loved, to understand and be understood. TB intervention is an exceptionally good global health investment. But that is not why I care about TB.