Archive

Quotes

He who dies of epidemic disease is a martyr.

—Muhammad, c. 630

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

—Jack London, 1912

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

—Agnes Repplier, 1929

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

—Anton Chekhov, 1904

Health can make money, but money cannot make health.

—Maria Edgeworth, 1833

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

—Charles Lamb, 1833

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

—Hans Zinsser, 1935

It is strange indeed that the more we learn about how to build health, the less healthy Americans become.

—Adelle Davis, 1951

The sick man is the parasite of society.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, 1889

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

—Thomas Mann, 1924

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

—Robert P. Hudson, 1983

Disease is not of the body but of the place.

—Latin proverb

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

—Plautus, c. 180 BC