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

Hopelessness has the insidious talent of explaining everything: the reason X or Y sucks is that everything sucks, the reason you’re miserable is because misery is the correct response to the world as we find it, and so on. I am prone to despair, and so I know its powerful voice; it just doesn’t happen to be true.

In all the heartbreaks of reading about tuberculosis, perhaps none has stayed with me quite like the image of a father trying to write in his dead daughter’s handwriting to his living daughter, in the hopes that she wouldn’t be crushed by the truth. In this father we see the humanity of people whose lives are torn asunder by TB—a humanity that is too often denied or minimized through stigma or romanticization.

Magazines also offered instructions for how to apply red paint to the lips and cheeks to capture the hectic glow of consumptive fevers. I probably do not need to point out that these standards of beauty are still informing what is considered to be feminine beauty in much of the world.

We would like to imagine that human history is largely the story of human choice. Perhaps this is why rumors have swirled for millennia that Alexander the Great died of poisoning even though he died of typhoid or malaria. We simply don’t want a world where even the most powerful emperor can be felled by mere infection. But history, alas, is not merely a record of what we do, but also a record of what is done to us.