A Quote by Susan Sontag

The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious--that is, a disease not understood--in an era in which medicine's central premise is that all diseases can be cured.

Susan Sontag

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Cancer Capricious Central Century Cured Disease Diseases Era Fantasies Inspired Last Medicine Now Premise Responses Thought Understood Which

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Susan Sontag
American - Author
January 16, 1933 - December 28, 2004

With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the character causes the disease -- because it has not expressed itself. Passion moves inward, striking and blighting the deepest cellular recesses.

Susan Sontag

Measles and TB evolved from diseases of our cattle, influenza from a disease of pigs, and smallpox possibly from a disease of camels. The Americas had very few native domesticated animal species from which humans could acquire such diseases.

Jared Diamond

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.

Eula Biss

Addiction is a symptom of not growing up. I know people think it's a disease... If you have a brain tumor, if you have cancer, that's a disease. To say that an addiction is a disease is not fair to the real diseases of the world.

C.C. DeVille

I think that of all the diseases in the world, the disease that all humankind suffers from, the disease that is most devastating to us is not AIDS, it's not gluttony, it's not cancer, it's not any of those things. It is the disease that comes about because we live in ignorance of the wealth of love that God has for us.

Rich Mullins

Unlike other diseases, the vulnerability to cancer lies in ourselves. We always thought of disease as exogenous, but research into cancer has turned that idea on its head - as long as we live, grow, age, there will be cancer.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by will power, are always an index of how much is not understood about the physical terrain of a disease.

Susan Sontag

We labor under the fatal delusion that no disease can be cured without medicine. This has been responsible for more mischief to mankind than any other evil. ...Disease increases in proportion to the increase to the number of doctors in a place.

Mahatma Gandhi

Many physical illnesses are associated with depression and anxiety, including heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, Parkinson's disease, stroke, kidney disease, lung disease, dementia and cancer.

Liz Miller

Cancer is a collection of many diseases with common principles, and each disease will have to be understood and more effectively controlled on its own terms.

Harold E. Varmus

I really do believe that America has this weight problem - obesity issues - and we have all these diseases that we get - heart disease, cancer, diabetes, autoimmune diseases - that are primarily lifestyle diseases.

John Mackey

I had liver disease. I'm completely cured now, but I thought about if I died from liver cancer, what my life would look like. I followed this wish of being a fiction writer.

Min Jin Lee

The ultimate goal is to have a pill that can prevent or reverse all diseases of aging. The major diseases that I'd like to tackle are heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer's and cancer. I want to reduce those diseases by 10 percent.

David Andrew Sinclair

Heart disease continues to be the number one killer; cancer, the number 2 killer, not far behind. The tragic aspect of these deadly diseases is that they could all be cured, I do believe, if we had sufficient funding.

Arlen Specter

Cancer is really a slew of rare diseases. Lung cancer has 700 sub-types, breast cancer has 30,000 mutations which means that every cancer in its own right is a rare disease. Sharing data globally in this context is really important from a life-threatening perspective.

Patrick Soon-Shiong

You've got to get away from the idea cancer is a disease to be cured. It's not a disease really. The cancer cell is your own body, your own cells, just misbehaving and going a bit wrong, and you don't have to cure cancer. You don't have to get rid of all those cells. Most people have cancer cells swirling around inside them all the time and mostly they don't do any harm, so what we want to do is prevent the cancer from gaining control. We just want to keep it in check for long enough that people die of something else.

Paul Davies

A Quote by Susan Sontag

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