Editor’s note: This segment was rebroadcast on Dec. 31, 2025. Click here for that audio.
Author John Green won acclaim for fiction like “The Fault in Our Stars,” a novel partially inspired by the life of Esther Earl and her struggle with cancer.
His newest book tells a different kind of story. “Everything is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection” traces how TB has shaped civilization.
But it’s also inspired by another young person’s battle with disease.
“I met Henry [Reider] at a tuberculosis hospital in Sierra Leone, a boy who had been living with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis,” Green said. “I thought he was 9 years old, the same age as my son, Henry.”
“It turned out he wasn’t 9, he was 17,” Green said. “He’d just been so stunted by malnutrition and by tuberculosis that he looked much younger.”
Even as Reider charmed Green and led him on a tour of his hospital, the disease was eating him alive.
“He was already on the last line of available antibiotics,” Green said. “As one doctor put it, that’s the point where you put the stethoscope down here — there was very little that was believed could be done for Henry.”
But over the years, Reider rallied as he gained access to treatments common in wealthy countries. Green stayed in touch and slowly grew obsessed with the disease and the injustices it exposes. He explored surprising origin stories. TB led to mass migrations to Western states, underpinned the creation of the Stetson hat, and even spurred the assassins that kicked off World War I.
Green even realized that tuberculosis snakes through his own family history.
“My great uncle, Stokes Goodrich, died of tuberculosis when he was 29 years old,” he said. “He died in a sanatorium like so many millions of Americans.”
Green also turned to activism. His efforts helped slash the price of a modern TB drug. He and his allies have pressured conglomerate Danaher to make its state-of-the-art diagnostic technology more accessible. He even pleaded for more international tuberculosis aid at a United Nations meeting.
“We have really good tools to cure tuberculosis, even most forms of drug-resistant tuberculosis,” Green said. “But too often those drugs are not near the people who need them.”
6 Questions with John Green
TB patients face stigma, but the thing that you really want us to know is that tuberculosis exists because we let it. In poorer countries that can’t afford the tremendous medications that we have, people are dying. Talk about that.
“It’s hard to even get your head around the extent of the inequity. But since tuberculosis became curable in the mid-1950s, we have allowed over 150 million people to die of the disease. It’s one of the great marks of shame in human history, I think. I had no idea about that. I had no idea that tuberculosis was even still a thing. I thought of it very much as that disease of British romantic poets. But then I met Henry at a tuberculosis hospital in Sierra Leone, a boy who had been living with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis.”
You also write about Shreya Tripathi, a young Indian activist who, by the way, loved your book, “The Fault in Our Stars.” She reread it as she was dying, but she sued the Indian government to get access to a modern TB drug. She won that case, but it came too late. Her lungs were gone. When you see something like that, what does that do to you?
“Well, it broke my heart. It made me feel like I hadn’t heard Shreya’s call early enough in my life. And if I’d heard it earlier, her story might have been different. And the story of other TB patients might have been different.
“But I’m also very grateful to Shreya for everything that she did to make this drug, which is called Bedaquiline, available to many more people. As a direct result of Shreya suing her government for access to Bedaquiline today, tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people are able to access that drug and see their lives saved as a result. Her legacy is rippling through each of those people’s lives.”
For many years, tuberculosis sufferers were also treated as special souls. The disease was a sign of creativity and sensitivity. But you write that “romanticization is not a kind or generous way of treating the ill.” How was this fashioned?
“It was a very strange period in human history when we really did romanticize tuberculosis. It was seen as making you not just beautiful, but also brilliant because it was understood to be an inherited condition that came with other personality traits like sensitivity and depth of thought.
“I remember Victor Hugo was told that he could have been a great writer if only he’d gotten consumption. Percy Shelley wrote John Keats and said, ‘Well, you know, this consumption is a disease that tends to strike people who write good verses, as you have done.’ Which always struck me as fascinating because Shelley knew that he also had TB. So he was also kind of complimenting himself.
“But it was a weird phenomenon. But I think the reason it happened was because usually we stigmatize illness away. We find a way to marginalize people who are living with illness. But with tuberculosis in the 18th and 19th centuries, it was striking everyone. One writer called it ‘the frightful tuberculosization of humanity.’ And as a result of this, this horror of everyone getting tuberculosis, nearly a third of all people dying from it, it was necessary to romanticize the disease. In England, in the United States, at one point, a third of all people were dying of it, at least in urban regions.”
But as soon as it became people of color in other places around the world, because the medications started to come about and it was no longer romanticized in Africa.
“That’s exactly right. And today, you know, tuberculosis is seen as a disease of poverty, a disease of contamination. These are the ways that we think about tuberculosis now. But that’s constructed in precisely the same way the romanticization of tuberculosis was constructed.
“It’s an airborne disease. It doesn’t have a moral compass. It doesn’t strike certain kinds of people because of certain kinds of reasons. Tuberculosis follows the paths of injustice that we blazed for it. It’s not in the business of blazing those paths. We are.”
Even though it was written before what we’ve been experiencing in the last month, this is the story of USAID. It’s the story of why we do this. And to those saying ‘why are we investing in these other countries?’ Well, because TB doesn’t care about a border — and it’s here.
“TB is very much here. There are 10,000 cases of active TB in the United States every year. That number has been going up for the last several years. And TB anywhere is a threat to people everywhere. This is an airborne disease. But I think we also have an obligation to understand that we are part of one human story, that the story of human health is deeply interconnected, that it knows no political borders, and that our obligations extend throughout the world.”
And that people like Henry Reider are worth our attention. I just fell in love with him.
“That’s exactly right. People like Henry are worth our attention. And if we believe, as I think we all do, that every human life has equal value, we must live that belief. We must find ways to live that value. I mean, my brother had cancer a year and a half ago — and at no point in my brother’s cancer treatment, even though it costs over 150 times more to cure Hank [Green] than it costs to cure Henry — at no point did anyone say this is a bad investment or this isn’t cost-effective, or this just doesn’t make sense. We would never say that to someone like Hank. And so why are we saying it to someone like Henry?”
James Perkins Mastromarino and produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Todd Mundt. Perkins Mastromarino adapted it for the web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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