Was this an old disease, and, if so, which one? If it was new, what did that say about the state of medical knowledge? And in any case, how could physicians make sense of it?

Medical research in the twentieth century mostly takes place in the lab; in the Renaissance, though, researchers went first and foremost to the library to see what the ancients had said.

Even more than this, however, the sick - like lepers - were often reviled because people believed that they had brought their torments upon themselves.

Perhaps more than any other disease before or since, syphilis in early modern Europe provoked the kind of widespread moral panic that AIDS revived when it struck America in the 1980s.

Was this an old disease, and, if so, which one? If it was new, what did that say about the state of medical knowledge? And in any case, how could physicians make sense of it?

The idea of infection began to be taken far more seriously than it ever had before. Hospitals transformed themselves in response to the new plague - sometimes for the better, but often for the worse, as when, in fear, they cast their ulcerated patients out into the streets.

Often, city fathers blamed prostitutes for the disease, and some threatened to brand their cheeks with hot iron if they did not desist from their vices.

Cancer is just a horrible disease.

From the very commencement the student should set out to witness the progress and effects of sickness and ought to persevere in the daily observation of disease during the whole period of his studies.

On January 1, 2006, Medicare will begin to offer a prescription drug benefit, and for the first time, it will place an emphasis on preventive care and early treatment of disease.

Fascism is a worldwide disease. Its greatest threat to the United States will come after the war, either via Latin America or within the United States itself.

It's far more important to know what person the disease has than what disease the person has.

The United States cannot feed every person, lift every person out of poverty, cure every disease, or stop every conflict. But our power and status have conferred upon us a tremendous responsibility to humanity.

Ambition can be a disease, and it feeds on itself.

Virtue consisted in avoiding scandal and venereal disease.

Anthrax is a deadly inhalational disease.

Ronald Reagan's well documented final battles with Alzheimer's disease were fought with the same conviction and courage that his many public battles were fought.

The worst disease which can afflict business executives in their work is not, as popularly supposed, alcoholism; it's egotism.

We live in a time when the words impossible and unsolvable are no longer part of the scientific community's vocabulary. Each day we move closer to trials that will not just minimize the symptoms of disease and injury but eliminate them.

Fear is a disease that eats away at logic and makes man inhuman.

The fact that I was fortunate enough to escape contagion, in spite of frequent, sometimes daily contacts with the disease, was because I soon guessed how it spread.

If I found a cure for a huge disease, while I was hobbling up onstage to accept the Nobel Prize they'd be playing the theme song from 'Three's Company'.

I'm never getting too lonely because it's the kind of disease where you might sit in front of the TV with three bags of biscuits, rather than communicate with the world.

Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.

We recognized in 1996 that, with progress in the field of genetics accelerating at a breathtaking pace, we need to ensure that advances in treatment and prevention of disease do not constitute a new basis for discrimination.

God - a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.

I really connect with those moments of doing missionary work down there and just seeing the people that are dying from disease and hunger and malnutrition.

I'll also tell you that five hundred thousand people will die this year of cancer. And I'll also tell you that one in every four will be afflicted with this disease, and yet, somehow, we seem to have put it in a little bit of the background.

Advances in technology and in our understanding of illness and disease together with an expanded workforce and greater resources will allow us to provide more services to a higher quality.

It is much more important to know what sort of a patient has a disease than what sort of a disease a patient has.

Pearl is a disease of oysters. Levant is a disease of Hollywood.

The disease is painless; it's the cure that hurts.

War is the symptom, not the disease.

I have been heartbroken once and it has affected all my relationships from there on. But now I look at it as a occupational hazard. If you are in the meat market at some point you are gonna get mad cows disease.

There are zillions of people who say that alcoholism is a disease, but not many of them believe it.

Aggression unopposed becomes a contagious disease.

Western civilization, Christianity, decency are struggling for their very lives. In this worldwide civil war, race prejudice is our most dangerous enemy, for it is a disease at the very root of our democratic life.

It is the American vice, the democratic disease which expresses its tyranny by reducing everything unique to the level of the herd.

Everybody's journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.

For somehow this disease inheres in tyranny, never to trust one's friends.

Childhood is a disease - a sickness that you grow out of.

Breast cancer is not just a disease that strikes at women. It strikes at the very heart of who we are as women: how others perceive us, how we perceive ourselves, how we live, work and raise our families-or whether we do these things at all.

It is more important to know what sort of person has a disease than to know what sort of disease a person has.

Gambling is a disease of barbarians superficially civilized.

The young physician starts life with 20 drugs for each disease, and the old physician ends life with one drug for 20 diseases.

Congress acknowledged that society's accumulated myths and fears about disability and disease are as handicapping as are the physical limitations that flow from actual impairment.

For the poison of hatred seated near the heart doubles the burden for the one who suffers the disease; he is burdened with his own sorrow, and groans on seeing another's happiness.

To study the phenomena of disease without books is to sail an uncharted sea, while to study books without patients is not to go to sea at all.

The pandemic of AIDS is a gender-based disease.