A Quote by Jill Lepore
Germ theory, which secularized infectious disease, had a side effect: it sacralized epidemiology.
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If the ‘germ theory of disease’ were correct, there’d be no one living to believe it.
Travel' is the name of a modern disease which became rampant in themid-fifties and is still spreading. The disease - its scientific name is travelitis furiosus - is carried by a germ called prosperity.
We've gone from a preponderance of acute and infectious disease as a source of premature death to chronic diseases, which are the preponderance of the burden of illness in most of the world. That puts a much higher premium on the prevention of chronic disease than ever in history.
In the 19th century, smallpox was widely considered a disease of filth, which meant that it was largely understood to be a disease of the poor. According to filth theory, any number of contagious diseases were caused by bad air that had been made foul by excrement or rot.
Infectious disease exists at this intersection between real science, medicine, public health, social policy, and human conflict. There's a tendency of people to try and make a group out of those who have the disease. It makes people who don't have the disease feel safer.
The diagnosis of drunkenness was that it was a disease for which the patient was in no way responsible, that it was created by existing saloons, and non-existing bright hearths, smiling wives, pretty caps and aprons. The cure was the patent nostrum of pledge-signing, a lying-made-easy invention, which like calomel, seldom had any permanent effect on the disease for which it was given, and never failed to produce another and a worse. Here the care created an epidemic of forgery, falsehood and perjury.
A disease of the mind, [whose] germ is the idea that one may learn that which is valuable, or in any way acquire virtue, by the process of being shown things.
For the public ever to break command science it must first understand the basis of its enormous powers.......Traditionally, the power of medical sciences has been based on the fear of disease, particularly infectious disease.
Alzheimer's is a disease for which there is no effective treatment whatsoever. To be clear, there is no pharmaceutical agent, no magic pill that a doctor can prescribe that will have any significant effect on the progressive downhill course of this disease.
Especially working in infectious disease, it's very interesting because these infectious diseases, these agents, they evolve over time. So it's very much an arms race and understanding how each changes to protect itself and to continue. And so it's very much this puzzle-solving but with this great urgency and importance in what you find.
In all technai or arts (medicine perhaps most of all), there is a self-exhilaration on the part of the practitioner (the intoxication of the ego with its own potency) which is infectious: the patient enjoys a placebo-effect which redounds to the ego of the "artist."
In macroeconomic theory, there is this argument that what the Fed does has no effect on unemployment, no effect on investment, no effect on the rate of GDP growth.
We have chosen to write the biography of our disease because we love it platonically - as Amy Lowell loved Keats - and have sought its acquaintance wherever we could find it. And in this growing intimacy we have become increasingly impressed with the influence that this and other infectious diseases, which span - in their protoplasmic continuities - the entire history of mankind, have had upon the fates of men.
Many a trace, and many a germ of this infantile disease, to which without a doubt, I also am a victim, has been chased away by your brochure, or will yet be eradicated by it.
In the same way that plants will not grow on soil that lacks some substance indispensable to their growth, so microbes, these microscopic plants which cause infectious disease, are unable to grow in an organism which does not give them all the substances they need.
All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.
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