Disease Etiology Quotes

I am not a physician, but I am deeply interested in diagnostic categories and have read extensively in the history of the subject.

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?

Physicians, when the cause of disease is discovered, consider that the cure is discovered.

Medicine is a science which hath been (as we have said) more professed than laboured, and yet more laboured than advanced: the labour having been, in my judgment, rather in circle than in progression. For I find much iteration, but small addition. It considereth causes of diseases, with the occasions or impulsions; the diseases themselves, with the accidents; and the cures, with the preservation.

In writing the history of a disease, every philosophical hypothesis whatsoever, that has previously occupied the mind of the author, should lie in abeyance.

We still think of human disease as the work of an organized, modernized kind of demonology, in which the bacteria are the most visible and centrally placed of our adversaries. We assume that they must somehow relish what they do.

I am sick of diseases, I want to know origins and processes…If we are to prevent disease it is to the beginning of the chain of accumulating stresses that we must look.

The writings and the recommendations of the earliest medical scientists and the new breed of clinicians between the mid-fifteenth and early seventeenth centuries were based on the supposition that sufficient study and experimentation would elucidate not only the origins of disease, but its treatment as well.

What sense would it make or what would it benfit a physician if he discovered the origin of the diseases but could not cure or alleviate them?

Investigating rare diseases gives researchers more clues about how the healthy immune system functions.