Tuberculosis Quotes

“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.”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

“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.”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

“Allowed to cast themselves for great tragic roles, they were experiencing the exhilaration felt by great tragic actors. It was not lack of control, lack of taste, lack of knowledge that accounted for permission of what was not permitted in the West. Rather was it the reverse. Our people could not have handled patients full of the dangerous thoughts of death and love; these people had such resources that they did not need to empty their patients of such freight.”
― Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

“This [Ulysses] is obviously the wave of the future, I'm glad I'm dying of tuberculosis.”
― Katherine Mansfield

“One might go to the bakery, perhaps," he said. "But did you know the baker has tuberculosis? All the people here run around in a highly infectious state. The baker's daughter has tuberculosis too, it seems to have something to do with the runoff from the cellulose factory, with the steam that the locomotives have spewed out for decades, with the bad diet that people eat. Almost all of them have cankered lung lobes, pneumothorax and pneumoperitoneum are endemic. They have tuberculosis of the lungs, the head, the arms and legs. All of them have tubercular abscesses somewhere on their bodies. The valley is notorious for tuberculosis. You will find every form of it here: skin tuberculosis, brain tuberculosis, intestinal tuberculosis. Many cases of meningitis, which is deadly within hours. The workmen have tuberculosis from the dirt they dig around in, the farmers have it from their dogs and the infected milk. The majority of the people have galloping consumption. Moreover," he said, "the effect of the new drugs, of streptomycin for example, is nil. Did you know the knacker has tuberculosis? That the landlady has tuberculosis? That the landlady has tuberculosis? That her daughters have been to sanatoria on three occasions? Tuberculosis is by no means on the way out. People claim it is curable. but that's what the pharmaceutical industry says. In fact, tuberculosis is as incurable as it always was. Even people who have been inoculated against it come down with it. Often those who have it the worst are the ones who look so healthy that you wouldn't suspect they were ill at all. Their rosy faces are utterly at variance with their ravaged lungs. You keep running into people who've had to endure a cautery or, at the very least, a transverse lesion. Most of them have had their lives ruined by failed reconstructive surgery." We didn't go to the bakery. Straight home instead.”
― Thomas Bernhard, Frost

“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.”
― Kathryn Hulme, The Nun's Story

“I know more about Emily Bronte than anyone I know. I know enough about her family to have been a part. I’ve walked with her on her damp luscious lonely moors, watched her strain to write on miniscule scraps of paper, seen her hide her works from prying eyes.
I’ve brooded alongside her and participated in her taciturnity. Before her death at the ripe old age of 30, I nursed her from the things that ultimately killed her: tuberculosis with a side order of Victorian thinking.”
― Chila Woychik, On Being a Rat and Other Observations

“Not long ago I was much amused by imagining—what if the fancy suddenly took me to kill some one, a dozen people at once, or to do some thing awful, something considered the most awful crime in the world—what a predicament my judges would be in, with my having only a fortnight to live, now that corporal punishment and torture is abolished. I should die comfortably in hospital, warm aad snug, with an attentive doctor, and very likely much more snug and comfortable than at home. I wonder that the idea doesn't strike people in my position, if only as a joke.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“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.”
― John Green , Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

“Twentieth century women's fashions (with their cult of thinness) are the last stronghold of the metaphors associated with the romanticizing of TB in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.”
― Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors

“I have learned that the conquest of Fate is not by struggling against it, but by acquiescence; that it is often through men that we come to know God; that spiritual courage is of a higher type than physical courage; and that it takes a higher type of courage to fight a losing rather than a winning fight.”
― Edward Livingston Trudeau

“Up to that time most of the Pimas and Maricopas wore long hair. One of the first steps towards their 'civilization' was to get them to cut their hair. Finding this a difficult problem, the agency offered a hat to anyone who cut his hair.
...
The [United States government-run] agency had a hard time getting those Pimas to give up their olas-ki [round houses] to build and live in adobe houses. Adobe houses were supposed to be more civilized than the old arrow-weed shelters. But the Pimas did not want to change. So the agency issued a wagon to any Pima family who would build and live in an adobe house. The only thing was, they forgot to issue plans, so a Pima who wanted a free wagon built an adobe house according to his old ideas of a house, with a small door and no windows. These were warm on the few cold nights, but there was no ventilation.
Some older people in my own family did what the agency told them to do. They built and lived in an adobe house. When they died they all died of tuberculosis.
[pages 49 and 50, Progress]”
― George Webb, A Pima Remembers

“I would never accept a world where Hank might be told: “I’m sorry, but while your cancer has a 92% cure rate when treated properly, there just aren’t adequate resources in the world to make that treatment available to you.” That world would be so obviously and unacceptably unjust. So how can I live in a world where Henry and his family are told that? 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?”
― John Green

“His complexion, like his father's, was dark and he had vertical furrows under each ear; an old country doctor had cured him surgically of swellings caused by milk from a tubercular cow. But even the scars were pleasant to see.”
― Saul Bellow, Collected Stories

“И, как лейкоцит в крови,
луна в твореньях певцов, сгоравших от туберкулеза,
писавших, что – от любви.”
― Joseph Brodsky

“The disease is still around, it's still contagious, and despite the fact that the vaccine costs approximately sixteen cents to produce, and $3.13 to buy, tuberculosis continues to ravage periphery countries.
Millions of people die from tuberculosis every year - and it's totally treatable. This is a disease we can eradicate in our lifetime.”
― Jennifer Wright

“So much might happen, and then only one set of things does.”
― John Green

“Between the purported sex appeal of tuberculosis and its special deadliness in young people, being afflicted with the disease—or at least, looking like you were—became associated with a certain status. This was a moment at which a woman’s value was strongly tied to femininity, fragility, and purity alike. The consumptive girl lived at the tantalizing nexus of all three: being made at once sexually desirable by sickness yet also too sick to consummate that desire. And her death, heartbreaking as it was, only cemented her status as a sort of archetype of female purity, unsullied by the usual forces that conspired to slowly rob a woman of her value. It was possible, in this moment, to imagine that tuberculosis patients were destined for something greater, something more meaningful, than the ordinary vagaries of a mortal life: when the consumptive girl passed, it would be in a state of unpolluted grace”
― Elizabeth Comen, All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women’s Bodies and Why It Matters Today – A Memorial Sloan Kettering MD's History of Healthcare and Agency

“The idea was just this: that there is something beautiful, and wonderfully feminine, and powerful and empowering at once, about a woman who can’t breathe.”
― Elizabeth Comen, All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women’s Bodies and Why It Matters Today – A Memorial Sloan Kettering MD's History of Healthcare and Agency

“Cuando el ganado se va, escapando de la sequía que ya empieza a agostar los campos y a hacer duros los pastizales, y se lleva lejos, por la montaña arriba, la leche y la carne, en el pabellón de reposo los enfermos siguen echados en sus chaiselongues, mirando para el cielo, tapados con sus mantas, de las que en este tiempo ya empiezan a sacar los brazos, pensando en su enfermedad.”
― Camilo José Cela, Pabellon de Reposo