Yes, Tuberculosis is Still a Thing. No, it's Not Inevitable.

Novelist John Green has a new collection of essays on tuberculosis that does as good a job at public health truth-telling as anything I’ve read this year. His writing is easy to understand. The truth of TB is not. Everything is Tuberculosis: the History and Persistence of our Deadliest Infection brings us details about the medical and cultural history of TB and its danger. We are now equipped to prevent, detect and treat it. What holds us back? 

In his introduction Green says “This is a book about that cure – why we didn’t find it until the 1950’s, and why in the decades since discovering the cure, we’ve allowed over 15,000,000 humans to die of tuberculosis. I started writing about TB because I wanted to understand how an illness could quietly shape so much of human history. But along the way, I learned that TB is both a form and expression of injustice.” (5)

Yesterday, following the lectionary cycles, many preachers addressed the parable of the Good Samaritan in their sermons. It only appears in the Gospel of Luke (who is, interestingly, the patron saint of physicians and artists). The story is so familiar that it can be hard to hear it with fresh ears. We use it as a reminder to be kind to strangers in need or to scold those we expect to help but do not. The question “Who is my neighbor?” certainly echoes emptily through recent political decisions in the U.S. We don’t know when any of us, individually or in populations, will land shocked and desperate in the ditch. We don’t know when we’ll find ourselves walking past others who are. It happens. I especially like to think about the innkeeper who is entrusted with the care of the man rescued from the ditch as he recovers. He’s paid to do it. This tips his role into that of healthcare and hospitality provider rather than a fellow traveler. Every person in the story matters.       

Green talks about our moment in time as being the middle of the tuberculosis story. Not the end. The parable of the Good Samaritan can be viewed this way, too. It is more than a tidy, contained example. What happens now?
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Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green is available from Crash Course Books (2025).

"Monetized Airways," Katy Giebenhain, 2025, mixed media (pastel, currency, mixed papers, mesh).