John Hersey Quotes

A human body is a conversation going on, both within the cells and between the cells, and they're telling each other to grow and to die; when you're sick, something's gone wrong with that conversation.

You can put a kidney in your body - and somewhere down the line, your body might reject it.

When a patient does get an organ from another person, it comes from a different body. It has different properties, and a person's natural tendency is to reject that organ.

When an animal is infected, either naturally or by experimental injection, with a bacterium, virus, or other foreign body, the animal recognises this as an invader and acts in such a way as to remove or destroy it.

My interest was directed, from my medical student days, to Immunology, and particularly to the mechanism of hypersensitivity. I had suffered from bronchial asthma as a child and had developed a deep curiosity in allergic phenomena.

Serious illness doesn't bother me for long because I am too inhospitable a host.

Once a disease has entered the body, all parts which are healthy must fight it: not one alone, but all. Because a disease might mean their common death. Nature knows this; and Nature attacks the disease with whatever help she can muster.

Inflammation as understood in man and the higher animals is a phenomenon that almost always results from the intervention of some pathogenic microbe.

Often, lectins can get in the way of important cells communicating with one another. And when that happens, the body's response is usually inflammation or some other type of reaction to toxicity, like nausea, diarrhoea, or vomiting.

Don't forget my new kidney is a foreign object. My body attacks it. So I have to take these anti-rejection drugs to stop my body winning.

Think about your immune system as being an army, and it's fighting infection.

Lectins are plant proteins that protect the plant and its seeds from being eaten by basically hacking into the animal's immune system, causing the animal to have inflammation.

Once you catch a disease and survive, you can't get it again.

Before I changed my diet, every time I ate, my torso would feel burning hot, and the areas around my lymph nodes would really ache.

Arthritis, Crohn's disease, psoriasis, depression - all of those diseases are a result of our neglected biochemistry. We need to be stimulated to help fight disease. Cold is a great stimulator.

The disease and its medicine are like two factions in a besieged town; they tear one another to pieces, but both unite against their common enemy, Nature.

Healthy people have a natural skill of avoiding feverish eyes.

CD4 being the level of the lymphocyte that indicates the level of your immune function.

There is only one constant element in immunity, whether innate or acquired, and that is phagocytosis. The extension and importance of this factor can no longer be denied.

I like to read general biology - things about the immune system and advances in that area - because it lays the foundation for my part of the dialogue at the foundation about what things we ought to pursue.

Against diseases here the strongest fence is the defensive vertue, Abstinence.

Immune system will heal itself.

People are amazed because I don't get much with the colds. Sometimes in the spring or in the fall, I'll get a little hay fever.

I'm such a baby if I even get a flu.

Almost no germ is unconditionally dangerous to man; its disease-producing ability depends upon the body's resistance.