Everything Is Tuberculosis

As we chatted, I realized I was looking at him differently than I had when I believed him to be the son of a staff member. He no longer reminded me of my nine-year-old son; now he was an emaciated young man.

Looking at history through any single lens creates distortions, because history is too complex for any one way of looking to suffice.

I want to pause here to note a defining feature of humans, which is that we like to know why things happen, especially why really bad things happen. And if a reason is not immediately apparent, we will find one. […] Vonnegut reminds us that we are both incline toward curiosity and inclined toward arriving at some kind of comprehensible conclusion.

History is often imagined as a series of events, unfolding one after the other like a sequence of falling dominoes. But most human experiences are processes, not events. Divorce may be an event, but it almost always results from a lengthy process—and the same could be said for birth, or battle, or infection. Similarly, much of what some imagine as dichotomous turns out to be spectral, from neurodivergence to sexuality, and much of what appears to be the work of individuals turns out to be the work of broad collaborations.

I should acknowledge, I guess, that one reason I’m interested in TB is that I have obsessive-compulsive disorder, and my particular obsessive worries tend to circle around microbes and illness.

People often ask me why I’m obsessed with tuberculosis. 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[...]

But of course people are not just their economic productivity. We do not exist primarily to be plugged into cost-benefit analyses. We are here to love and be loved, to understand and be understood. TB intervention is an exceptionally good global health investment, but that is not why I care about TB.

I care about TB because of Henry.

I found it extremely heartening to see all those donations pour in to this young man who has too often been neglected and ignored by society. It reminded me that when we know about suffering, when we are proximal to it, we are capable of extraordinary generosity. We can do and be so much for each other—but only when we see one another in our full humanity, not as statistics or problems but as people who deserve to be alive in the world.

Henry is a human being, just as you are a human being. Consider yourself for a moment—everything you’ve overcome, everything you’ve survived. Think of the people who loved you up into your now[…] Think about how rare and precious humans are, and how many of them you get to worry for and care about. Then, if you can, find a way to multiply that time 1,250,000.