Archive

Quotes

Everyone who is sick is someone else’s patient zero.

—Leslie Jamison, 2020

Diseases are not immutable entities but dynamic social constructions that have biographies of their own.

—Robert P. Hudson, 1983

Even diseases have lost their prestige, there aren’t so many of them left.

—Louis-Ferdinand Céline, 1960

Health can make money, but money cannot make health.

—Maria Edgeworth, 1833

Disease makes men more physical, it leaves them nothing but body.

—Thomas Mann, 1924

’Tis a portentous sign / When a man sweats and at the same time shivers.

—Plautus, c. 180 BC

Disease generally begins that equality which death completes.

—Samuel Johnson, 1750

What timid man does not avoid contact with the sick, fearing lest he contract a disease so near?

—Ovid, c. 10

How sickness enlarges the dimension of a man’s self to himself! He is his own exclusive object.

—Charles Lamb, 1833

Diseases, at least many of them, are like human beings. They are born, they flourish, and they die.

—David Riesman, 1937

We should always presume the disease to be curable until its own nature proves it otherwise.

—Peter Mere Latham, c. 1845

If they prescribe a lot of remedies for some sickness or other, it means that the sickness is incurable.

—Anton Chekhov, 1904

The diseases of the present have little in common with the diseases of the past save that we die of them.

—Agnes Repplier, 1929