Cooper

“As Frank M. Snowden observes in Epidemics and Society, white physicians in Europe and the U.S. generally agreed that consumption was, as some Everyone eighteenth-century observers put it, a disease of civilization.

Everyone knew that rural communities were less vulnerable to consumption. "Fond as I am of London," one mother wrote after both she and her daughter became ill, "there seems a fatality against my living in it." But in a highly racialized social order, conceiving of phthisis "civilized" disease also meant that it could not be a disease of uncivilized people, which furthered the racialization of consumption.

In Europe and the U.S., most white doctors believed that phthisis as it was inherited by those with great sensitivity and intelligence could only affect white people, and it was sometimes known as "The White Man's Plague." One American doctor, for instance, called it, "a disease of the master race not of the slave race.”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

“let us hasten to the ramparts adjoining the gate of Benjamin, which is in the city of David, and overlooking the camp of the uncircumcised;”
― Edgar Allan Poe, Edgar Allan Poe: Complete Tales and Poems

“It was an illness of the breath, of the place where the body interacts with the atmosphere, a process so sacred that the Hebrew word ruach, the Chinese word chi, the English word spirit, and the Inuit word sila all derive from words meaning breath or breathing. Breath is liferespiration is the most visible and irrefutable sign that we are still here. To inspire is to breathe in; to expire is to breathe all the way out.”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

“A 2024 study commissioned by the WHO found that every dollar spent on tuberculosis care generates around thirty-nine dollars in benefit by reducing the number (and expense) of future TB cases, and through more people being able to work rather than being chronically ill or caring for their chronically ill loved ones”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection