Quotes about illness

We are all ill; but even a universal sickness implies an idea of health.

White blood cells and other cells of ours actively seek out and kill foreign microbes. The specific antibodies that we gradually build up against a particular microbe infecting us make us less likely to get reinfected once we become cured. As we all know from experience, there are some illnesses, such as flu and the common cold, to which our resistance is only temporary; we can eventually contract the illness again. Against other illnesses, though—including measles, mumps, rubella, pertussis, and the now defeated smallpox — our antibodies stimulated by one infection confer lifelong immunity. That's the principle of vaccination: to stimulate our antibody production without our having to go through the actual experience of the disease, by inoculating us with a dead or weakened strain of microbe.

The infectious diseases that regularly visited crowded Eurasian societies, and to which many Eurasians consequently developed immune or genetic resistance, included all of history's most lethal killers: smallpox, measles, influenza, plague, tuberculosis, typhus, cholera, malaria, and others.

[Dr.] Riario’s laugh was harsh. “I hate smallpox, and even more I hate being helpless against it. If it’s God’s curse as they say, why, I curse God back for it.”

Wherever there is a heart and an intellect, the diseases of the physical frame are tinged with the peculiarities of these.

Madness is locked beneath. It goes into tissues, is swallowed by the cells. The cells go mad. Cancer is their flag. Cancer is the growth of madness denied.

It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.

Something about being helpless in bed, people hit you up for sympathy. They've got you where they want you.

What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits to arise, amid all its perfumed and hypnotic inducements to mate, a tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders?

The problem for a Paracelsian physician like me is that I see diseases as disguises in which people present me with their wretchedness.

...those who say I am being punished are saying that god can't think of anything more vengeful than cancer for a heavy smoker.

Ideas or the lack of them can cause disease.