I've been researching tuberculosis (TB) for over 25 years. No surprise, I have a big library of books on TB! In this post, I will highlight books that I've found to be fascinating, educational, and inspiring.
I will group books into 4 four categories: 1) historical; 2) fiction; 3) personal narratives; 4) contemporary.
History of the White Plague
Among historical books, The White Plague: Tuberculosis, Man, and Society, by René and Jean Dubos is a classic. TB treatment was not widely available when this book was written in 1952, but the authors were right on the spot on how social determinants play a key role. "TB presents problems that transcend the conventional medical approach…the impact of social and economic factors [must] be considered as much as the mechanisms by which tubercle bacilli cause damage to the human body," they wrote.
Tuberculosis: The Greatest Story Never Told, by Frank Ryan, is one of my favorite books. Published in 1992, it is a hopeful story of how TB finally became a curable disease, and how TB drugs and treatments were discovered. However, the books ends with the onset of the AIDS epidemic, and the growing threat of drug-resistant TB. Since 1992, we know how the story evolved - AIDS became a global epidemic and made TB much worse, and drug-resistance continues to be a global threat even today.
Thomas Daniel's Captain of Death was published in 1997. "Eight million people develop this disease every year," is what he wrote in his introduction, and predicted that TB "will almost certainly continue to increase."
Thomas Dormandy's The White Death, offers a superb historical account, and is full of old photographs and illustrations. Written in 1999, his words still ring true: "Time and again in the past - even before chemotherapy was supposed to have delivered the coup de grace - tuberculosis seemed conquered. Time and again it re-emerged with a grin."
Spitting Blood by Helen Bynum is another modern book on the history of TB, published in 2012. "The story of tuberculosis is far from over," she concluded as well.
In The Remedy (2014), Thomas Goetz chronicles the story of Robert Koch who not only identified the cause of TB, but also worked hard to develop a cure for the disease. It also follows the life of Arthur Conan Doyle who was inspired by Koch's scientific method, and adapted his scientific methods into his stories featuring a detective named Sherlock Holmes. Until I read The Remedy, I had no idea that Koch, Doyle and Holmes had any connection at all!
A highly accessible book on the history of TB is Tuberculosis: a short history edited by Alexander Medcalf, Henrice Altink, Monica Saavedra and Sanjoy Bhattacharya, published by the University of York and Orient BlackSwan in 2013. The entire book, filled with historical photographs, can be downloaded for free.
As you can see, several of these historical books predicted that TB is a disease that is unlikely to disappear. How right they were! In 2023, an estimated 10.8 million people fell ill with TB worldwide, and 1.25 million people died of TB. In 2025, things are set to become much worse due to the recent funding cuts. I am sure future historians will continue to write about the story of this plague that refuses to go away.
Fiction
While scores of fictional books & films include characters dying of tuberculosis, The Magic Mountain is famous. This novel by Thomas Mann, first published in Germany in 1924, captures the experience of people in a TB sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland. Yes, the Davos that now receives the rich and famous at the World Economic Forum every year was once home to TB sanatoria!
There are characters in Dostoyevsky’s novels Crime and Punishment and The Idiot who suffered from TB. The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair, relates how Chicago’s meatpackers were exposed to TB as an occupational hazard, and The Constant Gardener by John Le Carré deals with a corporate scandal which involves unethical testing of an experimental TB drug in Africa.
Of course, TB appears in several films, including the famous Moulin Rouge!
Personal stories
TB has deeply affected millions, and some have told their personal stories.
In Mountains Beyond Mountains (2003), American writer Tracy Kidder traces the life of physician and anthropologist Paul Farmer, especially his work on fighting tuberculosis in Haiti and other countries.
Paul Farmer himself had published Infections And Inequalities: The Modern Plagues in 2001. The book uses TB and AIDS in Haiti to illustrate how these infections thrive on poverty and social determinants. My favorite line is at the very end of the book: "The poor, we're told, will always be with us. If this is so, then infectious diseases will be, too."
In Consumed: A Sister’s Story, Arifa Akbar, the Guardian’s chief theatre critic, wrote about the death of her older sister, who died of TB in London in 2016.
Stigmatized, published in 2021, is a memoir by Handaa Enkh-Amgalan, a Mongolian woman who was diagnosed with TB. The book chronicles her struggles with the disease, the stigma and social prejudice that often accompanies the disease, and her path to reclaiming her identify and agency.
Contemporary
Catching Breath: The Making and Unmaking of Tuberculosis (2017) is an exceedingly readable account of TB science, written by Katheryn Lougheed, a basic scientist who studied Mycobacterium tuberculosis.
In Phantom Plague (2022), Vidya Krishnan, a health and science journalist from India traces the history of TB, and connects that story to the ongoing impact it is having in India, the country with the highest number of people with TB. While India has the resources to fight TB, too many people are still being left behind. Her books explains why.
The Black Angels, published in 2023, is by Maria Smilios, an American author. Spanning the Great Depression and moving through World War II and beyond, this book is about the intrepid young women, the “Black Angels,” who, for twenty years, risked their lives working under dreadful conditions while caring for New York city’s poorest in a sanatorium. Yet despite their heroic work, these nurses were completely erased from history.
Everything is TB, published in 2025, is by John Green, a best-selling author of books including The Fault in Our Stars and Turtles All the Way Down. The book is about the history of TB, and how it continues to devastate lives even today. Green dives deep into the structural inequities that allow TB to kill millions even today. You can read my interview with John Green in Forbes, and my book review in The Lancet.
As I wrote in a previous post, all these contemporary books clearly show us that TB thrives on racism, prejudice, poverty, and injustice. If we want to end TB, we can. We are choosing not to. If I were to write a book on TB, I would call it the Plague That Refuses To Go Away.