Microbes challenge my very understanding of myself—what am “I,” in the end, if half of me isn’t me, and the half of me that isn’t me dictates some of “my” thinking and feeling?

To inspire is to breathe in; to expire is to breathe all the way out.

It was as if the cure did not exist—because the disease was where the cure was not, and the cure was where the disease was not.

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

Of course, tuberculosis doesn’t know what it’s doing, but for centuries, the disease has used social forces and prejudice to thrive wherever power systems devalue human lives—an experience that, back in Sierra Leone, Henry and his mother, Isatu, knew all too well.

The world we share is a product of all the worlds we used to share.

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.

at least some of my thoughts may belong not to me, but to the microorganisms in my digestive tract.

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.