BOOK REVIEW
“The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection,” by John Green
Part history and part memoir, “Everything Is Tuberculosis” follows “phthisis” through its bizarre possible origins, symptoms, treks around the world, cures, deaths, and current stubborn resistance to eradication.
James Watt, a Scotsman and inventor of the steam engine, whose daughter died in 1794, and whose son fell ill as well, begins this book with an invention to shift the oxygen available to the body. Unsuccessful!
Then the author moves to his own uncle, a “sickly baby” who fell ill with the typical symptoms of “consumption,” the familiar name for tuberculosis (TB) by 1900, and who finally died at age 29 in a TB sanatorium in Ashville, North Carolina.
His father, a doctor, couldn’t save him either. The author uses these examples to begin a litany of trials and errors, illnesses and deaths, successes and failures that have marked the path of this sickness since it was first recorded long ago as an “inherited disease.”
Early in his book, Green travels to Sierra Leone, which at that time had the highest maternal mortality rate in the world, and met seventeen-year-old Henry in Lakka, a facility sponsored by Partners in Health. Henry becomes the touchstone, the motif throughout Everything Is Tuberculosis, who ties this ancient disease to a modern-day survivor, fighting for life every day.
Through the years, TB has been romanticized as female victims were seen as purer and more beautiful. Later, renamed the “White Plague,” the disease found itself a part of “racialized medicine,” often leading to violence. Shame and dishonor have made tuberculosis one of the most stigmatized diseases in the world.
Indeed, malnutrition plus squalid and crowded living conditions contribute to the spread and intensity of TB. The author also examines the establishment of sanatoriums where “clean air, rest, and sunshine” offered hope and courage in hundreds of dedicated hospitals throughout the United States.
Yet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, all three Brontë sisters, Eleanor Roosevelt, Sir John Keats – all TB victims — are hardly “residents of poverty” as Green labels those who have often been considered to be the usual TB patients.
Since 1950, protocols, treatment, and medicines have eradicated TB in the “civilized” parts of the world.
Henry, however, lives as a TB victim in a part of the world where 1.2 million people die each year of a disease, which can now be cured.
Today, millions of TB patients suffer from this curable disease – a statement that defies logic, except for this conundrum: “The cure is where the disease is not, and the disease is where the cure is not.” Thought TB is curable, “we choose not to live in a world without TB.”
Thus enters the politics of the situation: “TB is both a form and expression of injustice.”
A bit of local history: In 1919, the post office at Sanatorium, Texas, opened on the campus of the 330-acre Anti-Tuberculosis Colony No. 1, the first of its kind in Texas, for rest and clean air, the only remedy available at the time, for patients ages 6 to 60.
The facility itself began in 1912 with 57 beds but had a difficult time attracting employees because of the fear of TB, low wages, and its rural location. By the time it converted to the San Angelo State School in 1969, the McKnight State Tuberculosis Hospital in Carlsbad, Texas, had treated approximately 50,000 adults and 5,000 juvenile patients.
— Kay Bradshaw Holland
