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

Death from the bubonic plague is rated, with crucifixion, among the nastiest human experiences of all.

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

The best quarantine is hygiene.

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

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

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

Hygienic law, like martial law, supersedes rights in crises.

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

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

He who dies of epidemic disease is a martyr.

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

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