Framing illness as even involving morality seems to me a mistake, because of course cancer does not give a shit whether you are a good person. Biology has no moral compass. It does not punish the evil and reward the good. It doesn’t even know about evil and good.

People who are treated as less than fully human by the social order are more susceptible to tuberculosis. But it’s not because of their moral codes or choices or genetics; it’s because they are treated as less than fully human by the social order.

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.

But most human experiences are processes, not events.

“TB’s parallel journey with capital,” as the investigative journalist Vidya Krishnan put it, appears in outbreak after outbreak.

If the pale, thin, wide-eyed, rosy-cheeked beauty standard has proven astonishingly durable, the conflation of whiteness with consumption would prove even more devastating to human health and equity.

“The beauty of women is greatly owing to their delicacy, or weakness.”

or Vincent van Gogh’s mental illness. There’s something about the candle snuffed out prematurely that captures our imagination—it is the thought, perhaps, of the books and paintings and songs that might’ve been, or the idea that artists simply burn too bright for this world.

“death would destroy even those pains which are better than nothing.”