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Quotes About Disease

That's primordial ooze! It's brimming with microbes! Back in the Age of Mortality, this single basin could have wiped out entire populations. It was called 'disease.
~ Neal Shusterman
the woman sitting beside him in 15A. There was no 15B—the concept of the B seat, where one had to sit between two other passengers, had been eliminated along with other unpleasant things, like disease and government.
~ Neal Shusterman
Smallpox, polio, Ebola, anthrax
~ Neal Shusterman
Colonial writers knew that disease tilled the virgin soil of the Americas countless times in the sixteenth century. But what they did not, could not, know is that the epidemics shot out like ghastly arrows from the limited areas they saw to every corner of the hemisphere, wreaking destruction in places that never appeared in the European historical record.
~ Charles C. Mann
Charles's army disintegrated as it fled, shedding companies of venereal soldiers along the way. A more effective means for spreading syphilis over a large area is hard to imagine. Within a year cities throughout Europe were banishing people afflicted with the disease.
~ Charles C. Mann
Syphilis seems to have existed in the Americas before 1492—the third argument. In the mid-1990s Bruce and Christine Rothschild, researchers at the Arthritis Center of Northeast Ohio, in Youngstown, inspected 687 ancient Indian skeletons from the United States and Ecuador for signs of syphilitic disease. Up to 40 percent of the skeletons from some areas showed its presence.
~ Charles C. Mann
Indeed, some medical researchers propose that syphilis has always existed worldwide, but manifested itself differently in different places.
~ Charles C. Mann
but it was not a history-maker" like smallpox. Treponema pallidum, awful as it was and is, did not help topple empires or push whole peoples to extinction.
~ Charles C. Mann
Because the hostility between the Wampanoag and the neighboring Narragansett had restricted contact between them, the disease had not spread to the latter. Massasoit's people were not only beset by loss, they were in danger of subjugation.
~ Charles C. Mann
To Dobyns, the moral of this story was clear. The Inka, he wrote in his 1963 article, were not defeated by steel and horses but by disease and factionalism
~ Charles C. Mann
Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, this pattern occurred again and again in the Americas. It was a kind of master narrative of postcontact history. In fact, Europeans routinely lost when they could not take advantage of disease and political fragmentation
~ Charles C. Mann
Dobyns calculated that in the first 130 years of contact about 95 percent of the people in the Americas died. To estimate native numbers before Columbus, one thus had to multiply census figures from those times by a factor of twenty or more.
~ Charles C. Mann
Although the archaeological record is suggestive, it is also frustratingly incomplete; soon after the Spaniards visited, mass graves became more common in the Southeast, but there is yet no solid proof that a single Indian in them died of a pig-transmitted disease. Asserting that De Soto's visit caused the subsequent collapse of the Caddo and Coosa may be only the old logical fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc.
~ Charles C. Mann
Maize swept into Africa as introduced disease was leveling Indian societies. Faced with a labor shortage, the Europeans turned their eyes to Africa.
~ Charles C. Mann
In South America, he estimated, the minimum probability that a pathogen in one host will next encounter a host with a similar immune spectrum is about 28 percent; in Europe, the chance is less than 2 percent. As a result, Black argued, "people of the New World are unusually susceptible to diseases of the Old.
~ Charles C. Mann
what scientists call zoonotic disease was little known in the Americas.
~ Charles C. Mann
Even the idea of contagion itself was novel. "We had no belief that one Man could give [a disease] to another," the Blackfoot raider remembered, "any more than a wounded Man could give his wound to another." Because they knew of no protective measures, the toll was even higher than it would have been.
~ Charles C. Mann
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries many Amazonian Indians, the Yanomamo among them, abandoned their farm villages, which had made them sitting ducks for European diseases and slave trading. They hid out in the forest, preserving their freedom by moving from place to place; in what Balée calls "agricultural regression," these hunted peoples necessarily gave up farming and kept body and soul together by foraging.
~ Charles C. Mann
By 2007—just three years after the first report of Morgellons—the CDC received about twelve hundred reports of Morgellons, triggering the inquiry. This was quite remarkable, given that the disease doesn't really exist.
~ Charles Seife
We were created for a world where the rule of law did not extend to our kind, and our earliest templates were trained and triaged, so that only the obedient survived. Just imagining the act of disobeying an instruction from one of our Creators can bring about physically disturbing symptoms— Then they all died. And the society we built for ourselves in the twilit afterlife of their world, using the rules they laid out for us, is diseased.
~ Charles Stross
They're vermin, Bob. They've been driven inland by over-fishing and now they're spreading disease, attacking waste collections, keeping people awake in the small hours, and carrying away stray cats and small dogs. Next thing you know they'll be cloning credit cards and planning bank robberies." "Yes, but…" I see no point in arguing; it's not as if I like seagulls.
~ Charles Stross
In the vocabulary of certain radical theorists contradictions are given the status of some deadly disease to which their opponents alone can succumb. But contradictions are the very stuff of life. If there had been a little dash of contradiction among the Gadarene swine some of them might have been saved from drowning.
~ Chinua Achebe
A disease that has never been seen before cannot be cured with everyday herbs.
~ Chinua Achebe
Ive got Parkinsons disease, I am always going to have Parkinsons disease unless they find a miracle cure, Ive got to deal with this the best I can.
~ Paul Sinha