The following version of this book was used to create this study guide: Green, John. Everything is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of our Deadliest Infection. Crash Course Books, 2025

“Introduction: Gregory and Stokes” tells the reader the story of two white men from similar backgrounds but different centuries, who ultimately died of tuberculosis (TB) despite two very different attempts to treat them. It then explains the current state of TB around the world today and the author’s interest in understanding and fighting this disease.

Chapter 1, “Lakka,” tells how John Green first became invested in TB (tuberculosis) as a cause. Green is a philanthropist visiting Sierra Leone as part of a global health initiative, and Henry is a TB patient in an underfunded government hospital. Though Henry is the one with tuberculosis, he has high energy and an enthusiastic outlook.

Chapter 2, “Cowboys and Assassins” follows Green home to America, where he learns everything he can about the history and on-going effects of TB. He discusses how people who are suffering from TB, those who avoid having TB, and those who are trying to treat TB have shaped history, especially in America and Europe. He also describes how human societies and biases have impacted TB.

Chapter 3, “Look at our Railroads” tells how the history of Sierra Leone as a nation has left it still struggling with twin epidemics of TB and the stigmatization of having TB. It also tells the family history of Henry and his mother, Isatu. Though both had strong drives to achieve. they were left struggling to afford both education and TB treatments.

Chapter 4, "That Wealth Never Warded Off” goes into the history of TB. Human understanding of the disease changed little from ancient times until the early 1800s because it seemed to impact rich and poor equally. This chapter relates the basic mechanism of TB and how hard it would have been to understand that without specific technologies available.

Chapter 5, “Whipped Away,” tells how Henry developed TB as a child. It shows how much his family’s world was rocked, both by the cost of treating the disease and by the stigma surrounding it. Henry’s younger sister died before their mother was able to raise funds for treatment. When Henry obtained treatment, it was so expensive and painful that his father decided a faith healer was a better option. This gave Henry a chance to be treated like a person instead of a number, but it also allowed his TB to develop drug resistance.

Chapter 6, “Tiger Got to Hunt,” talks about the different ways humans have tried to understand and interpret TB. Before becoming treatable, TB was often viewed as a disease of weak or immoral people. When TB became so rampant in the 1800s that no one could say only bad people had it, there was a new push to romanticize it by saying that it actually made people better and smarter.

Chapter 7, “A Flattery Malady,” explores the ideas that if TB made men better writers and poets, it made women great beauties. The “tubercular look” became extremely popular in the 1800s and still influences some of today’s beauty standards. Pale skin is usually considered a beauty standard. Thus, some believed only white people could have TB. This fallacy affected the care of patients.

Chapter 8, “The Bacillus,” describes the scientific experiments through which Robert Koch discovered the bacteria that causes TB. This erased the mystery around TB, which made it easier to treat. However, it also removed the romanticism, causing people with TB to be seen as dirty.

Chapter 9, “Not a Person,” describes just how stigmatized TB patients came to be in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The stigma of having the disease was perpetuated on the understanding that it was spread from person-to-person, especially in poor and crowded environments, mixed with the racism of the time. Sufferers were blamed for bringing the disease on themselves. They were avoided by others, an issue that continues today.

In Chapter 10, “A Study in Tuberculin,” Koch rushed to find a cure for TB before his French competitor, Louis Pasture. However, Koch's vaccine did not work. Arthur Conan Doyle, who was a doctor and writer, discovered that Koch's serum merely detected the presence of TB and did not cure it. This led to Koch's public disgrace.

Chapter 11, “Trepidation and Hope,” describes efforts to stop TB from spreading. It introduces the reader to life in a sanatorium, the treatment centers for TB patients. The patients in the sanatoriums were not supposed to gossip, laugh, cry, or see visitors because they needed to keep all their focus and positive attitudes on recovering from the disease.

Chapter 12, “The Cure,” talks about how after decades of research, multiple discovers were all made in quick succession. A vaccine was discovered that proved effective in children ages 5 and under. Multiple antibiotics were found to treat TB. It was almost wiped out entirely in rich countries; however, those who could not afford it actually saw spikes in TB deaths.

Chapter 13, “Where the Cure is Not,” discusses Directly Observed Therapy, short-course (DOTS). It is often the only method of treatment available in poorer countries, but it has many medical and/or financial short comings. The biggest obstacle is that it automatically treats all patients with suspicion and a lack of agency.

Chapter 14, “Marco. Polo.” covers the development (or lack thereof) of TB drugs, and how both making them expensive and not making new versions of them leads to the growth of drug-resistance and multi-drug-resistant TB.

Chapter 15, “Dr. Girum,” introduces Dr. Girum Tefera to the reader, and by discussing the issues he’s faced in his medical career working in various parts of Africa, also introduces the reader to some of the major issues surrounding the cost and availability of TB testing.

Chapter 16, “Henry,” shows Henry taking a turn for the worse, both physically, and mentally. Dr. Girum realizes the only thing that can save Henry is a personally tailored cocktail of drugs, all of which will have to be found in other countries.

In Chapter 17, “Beat Me Later,” Henry’s father tries to take him home, saying that the drugs aren’t working anyway, and they should make him comfortable and put it in God’s hands, even threatening the doctor for keeping his son locked away. Despite his depression, Henry decides to stay at the hospital and try Dr. Girum’s new idea. Henry's closest friend dies of TB, leaving Henry alone in the sanatorium's ward.

Chapter 18, “Superbug,” describes the threat the whole world will face if TB continues to gain resistance to all available drugs. The author argues that we should care about curing TB even if it only affects people in some countries.

Chapter 19, “Vicious Cycles,” discusses how TB can worsen AIDS, and AIDS can worsen TB. However, the author says that poverty and racism were the main reasons that both diseases continued to spread in poor countries long after they were tamped down in richer ones. Thus, poverty and racism also increased as a result of both diseases spreading.

Chapter 20, “Hail Mary,” describes the scene as Henry’s medicine finally arrived in Sierra Leone. To keep his depression at bay while waiting for a treatment that may or may not work, Henry wrote poetry. in much worse conditions than the poets discussed earlier in the book.

In Chapter 21, “Like Magic,” Henry starts to get better, and he is able to go home. However, even as his body heals, he and his mother still struggle with the damage TB had done to their lives.

Chapter 22, “Virtuous Cycles,” talks about the efforts of the international community, especially an organization called Partners in Health (PIH), to get effective treatment for MDR-TB to middle- and low-income countries. It relates how efforts to justify the cost of treatment and efforts to bring down the costs of treatment work hand-in-hand.

Chapter 23, “The Cause and the Cure,” says that we already have all of the science and medicine needed to treat TB. Thus, poverty and the lack of infrastructure, which are the root causes of the disease, should be addressed. Those causes allow tuberculosis to continue to spread despite the available science. It asks readers to think about what kind of world would they like to inhabit in the future.

The Postscript gives a more information on the author his involvement in this topic. It also gives updates on Henry and asks readers to remember that every one of the 1,250,000 people who die of TB each year could have been as wonderful and as loved as Henry.