Archive

Quotes

Disease is not of the body but of the place.

—Latin proverb

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

—Thomas Mann, 1924

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

—Hans Zinsser, 1935

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

—Charles Lamb, 1833

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

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

—David Riesman, 1937

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

—Plautus, c. 180 BC

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

—Samuel Hopkins Adams, 1913

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

—Jewel Plummer Cobb, 1989

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

—Agnes Repplier, 1929

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

—Jack London, 1912