Disease

A disease is a particular abnormal condition, a disorder of a structure or function, that affects part or all of an organism. The causal study of disease is called pathology. Disease is often construed as a medical condition associated with specific symptoms and signs.

Most Read This Week Tagged "Disease"

The Black Death: A Global History of Humanity's Most Devastating Pandemic

Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues

Patient Zero: A Curious History of the World's Worst Diseases

The Phantom Plague: How Tuberculosis Shaped History

Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History

A Bird in the Air Means We Can Still Breathe

Pox Romana: The Plague That Shook the Roman World (Turning Points in Ancient History)

Viral: The Search For the Origin Of COVID-19

The Plague Cycle: The Unending War Between Humanity and Infectious Disease

Outcast: In Search of Leprosy, a Misunderstood Disease

The Good Virus: The Amazing Story and Forgotten Promise of the Phage

More most read this week tagged "disease"...

Disease Books

The Hot Zone: The Terrifying True Story of the Origins of the Ebola Virus

Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World

The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History

Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus

The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time

Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance

The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, the Epidemic that Shaped Our History

More disease books...

Lists

How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog) by Lee Alan Dugatkin

The Birds of Pandemonium by Michele Raffin

Animal Science for Adults

278 books — 88 voters

Shadow of a Survivor by John Walker Pattison

Me and My Shadow by John Walker Pattison

Osteoporosis Prevention by Susan Landers

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

Modern Medical Science (nonfiction)

270 books — 240 voters

The Secret Life of a Weight-Obsessed Woman by Iris Ruth Pastor

Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs

Leaving Isn't the Hardest Thing by Lauren Hough

Unsettling Memoirs & Biographies

581 books — 522 voters

Best Strange and Twisted Memoirs

788 books — 1,223 voters

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon

Medicine and Literature

2,067 books — 2,409 voters

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman

Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder

Public Health

232 books — 231 voters

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Quotes Tagged “Disease”

“ I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a touch – hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases, generally. I forget which was the first distemper I plunged into – some fearful, devastating scourge, I know – and, before I had glanced half down the list of “premonitory symptoms,” it was borne in up I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a touch – hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases, generally. I forget which was the first distemper I plunged into – some fearful, devastating scourge, I know – and, before I had glanced half down the list of “premonitory symptoms,” it was borne in upon me that I had fairly got it. I sat for awhile, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of despair, I again turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever – read the symptoms – discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it – wondered what else I had got; turned up St. Vitus’s Dance – found, as I expected, that I had that too, – began to get interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom, and so started alphabetically – read up ague, and learnt that I was sickening for it, and that the acute stage would commence in about another fortnight. Bright’s disease, I was relieved to find, I had only in a modified form, and, so far as that was concerned, I might live for years. Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed to have been born with. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid’s knee. ... I had walked into that reading-room a happy, healthy man. I crawled out a decrepit wreck. I went to my medical man. He is an old chum of mine, and feels my pulse, and looks at my tongue, and talks about the weather, all for nothing, when I fancy I’m ill; so I thought I would do him a good turn by going to him now. “What a doctor wants,” I said, “is practice. He shall have me. He will get more practice out of me than out of seventeen hundred of your ordinary, commonplace patients, with only one or two diseases each.” So I went straight up and saw him, and he said: “Well, what’s the matter with you?” I said: “I will not take up your time, dear boy, with telling you what is the matter with me. Life is brief, and you might pass away before I had finished. But I will tell you what is NOT the matter with me. I have not got housemaid’s knee. Why I have not got housemaid’s knee, I cannot tell you; but the fact remains that I have not got it. Everything else, however, I HAVE got.” And I told him how I came to discover it all. Then he opened me and looked down me, and clutched hold of my wrist, and then he hit me over the chest when I wasn’t expecting it – a cowardly thing to do, I call it – and immediately afterwards butted me with the side of his head. After that, he sat down and wrote out a prescription, and folded it up and gave it me, and I put it in my pocket and went out. I did not open it. I took it to the nearest chemist’s, and handed it in. The man read it, and then handed it back. He said he didn’t keep it. I said: “You are a chemist?” He said: “I am a chemist. If I was a co-operative stores and family hotel combined, I might be able to oblige you. Being only a chemist hampers me.” I read the prescription. It ran: “1 lb. beefsteak, with 1 pt. bitter beer every 6 hours. 1 ten-mile walk every morning. 1 bed at 11 sharp every night. And don’t stuff up your head with things you don’t understand.” I followed the directions, with the happy result – speaking for myself – that my life was preserved, and is still going on. ...more ”
― Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat

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“ The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an incre ...more ”
― Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life

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