All the world is topsy-turvy, and it has been topsy-turvy ever since the plague.

The passion for setting people right is in itself an afflictive disease.

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

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

If we wait for a pandemic to appear, it will be too late to prepare.

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

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

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

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

He who dies of epidemic disease is a martyr.

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

I reckon being ill as one of the great pleasures of life, provided one is not too ill and is not obliged to work till one is better.

’Tis the destroyer, or the devil, that scatters plagues about the world.