J.’s Reviews > Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection > Status Update

"It's easy to blame patients or providers or pharmaceutical companies, but really all of humanity has collectively chosen not to put more of our shared resources toward new treatments for disease."

"The disease was framed, as disease so often has been, as a moral quandary--if you don't wear high heels, and you don't live unnaturally in a city, and you don't drink, and you don't cry at night when you're four years old and miss your mother, then you will survive. But patients like Gale knew this was a lie. They knew it because they saw their friends die."

"It's hard to overstate how profound the link between consumption and creative genius was in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe and the U.S. When TB rates declined in the U.S. toward the end of the nineteenth century, some physicians worried it wild harm the quality of American literature."

"But we cannot save those we love from suffering. This is the story of human history as I understand it--the story of an organism that can do so much, but cannot do what it most wants."