Archive

Quotes

Men worry over the great number of diseases, while doctors worry over the scarcity of effective remedies.

—Bian Qiao, c. 500 BC

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

—Leslie Jamison, 2020

I have learned much from disease which life could never have taught me anywhere else.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1830

In times of pestilence, gaiety and joyousness are most profitable.

—Jacme d’Agramont, 1348

Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness.

—Susan Sontag, 1963

He who dies of epidemic disease is a martyr.

—Muhammad, c. 630

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

—Peter Mere Latham, c. 1845

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

—Plautus, c. 180 BC

Infectious disease is one of the few genuine adventures left in the world.

—Hans Zinsser, 1935

Health care delivery is one of the tragedies still in America.

—Jewel Plummer Cobb, 1989

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

—Ovid, c. 10

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

—Thomas Mann, 1924

Disease generally begins that equality which death completes.

—Samuel Johnson, 1750