Catherine

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

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

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

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