I am a Doctor. A.B.†M.A.†PH.D.†ABMAPHID!†a wasting disease of the frontal lobes.

-Albee, Edward Franklin, III
  Spoken by a college professor. Who's  Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Hypochondria is the only disease I haven't got.

-Anonymous
  Graffito seen in NewYork.

Life is a sexually transmitted disease.

-Anonymous
Graffito, quoted in D  J Enright Faber Book of Fevers and Frets (1989).

O born in days when wits were fresh and clear, And life ran gaily as the sparklingThames: Before this strange disease of modern life, With its sick hurry, its divided aims, Its heads o'ertaxed, its palsied hearts, was rifeö Fly hence, our contact fear!

-Arnold, Matthew
  Poems:  A New Edition,'The Scholar-Gipsy', l.201^6.

The remedy is worse than the disease.

-Bacon, Francis,Viscount St Albans
  Essays, no.15,'Of Seditions and Troubles'.

As if you would call a physician, that is thought good for the cure of the disease you complain of but is Bacon unacquainted with your body, and therefore may put you in the way for a present cure but overthroweth your health in some other kind; and so cure the disease and kill the patient.

-Bacon, Francis,Viscount St Albans
  Essays, no.27,'Of Friendship'.

Physicians of the utmost fame Were called at once, but when they came Theyanswered, as they took their fees, 'There is no cure for this disease.'

-Belloc, (Joseph) Hilaire Pierre
  Cautionary  Tales,'Henry King'.

La eternidad rotativa puede parecer atroz al espectador; es satisfactoria para sus individuos. Libres de malas noticias y de enfermedades, viven siempre como si fuera la primera vez, sin recordar las anteriores. A circular eternity may seem atrocious to the spectator, but it is satisfactory to individuals inside. Free from bad news and disease, theyalways live as if it were the first time, and do not remember previous times.

-Bioy Casares, Adolfo
  La invencio¤  n de Morel ( The Invention of Morel,1964).

If a lot of cures are suggested for a disease, it means that the disease is incurable.

-Chekhov, Anton
  The Cherry Orchard, act1 (translated by Elisaveta Fen).

The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs. It is a disease which arises from men not having sufficient power of expression to utter and get rid of the element of art in their being.

-Chesterton, G(ilbert) K(eith)
  Heretics, ch.17.

Life is an incurable disease.

-Cowley, Abraham
  'To Dr Scarborough', stanza 6.

pity this busy monster, manunkind, not. Progress is a comfortable disease.

-cummings, e e pen name of  Edward Estlin Cummings
1x1, no.14.

Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car.You would call that not a disease but an error of judgement.

-Dick, Philip K(indred)
  A Scanner Darkly, author's note.

That it is at least as difficult to staya moral infection as a physical one; that such a disease will spread with the malignityand rapidity of the Plague; that the contagion, when it has once made head, will spare no pursuit or condition, but will lay hold on people in the soundest health, and become developed inthe most unlikely constitutions; is a fact as firmlyestablished by experience as that we human creatures breathe an atmosphere.

-Dickens, CharlesJohn Huffam
^7  Little Dorrit, bk.2, ch.13.

A desperate disease requires a dangerous remedy.

-Fawkes, Guy
   When questioned after his arrest on 5 Nov.

Nature is nowhere accustomed more openly to display her secret mysteries than in cases where she shows tracings of her workings apart from the beaten paths; nor is there any better way to advance the proper practice of medicine than to give our minds to the discovery of the usual law of nature, by careful investigation of cases of rarer forms of disease.

-Harvey,William
  Letter to  John Vlackveld, 24  Apr.

It is a most extraordinary thing, but I never read a patent medicine advertisement without being impelled to the conclusionthat Iamsuffering fromtheparticulardisease therein dealt with in its most virulent form.

-Jerome,Jerome K(lapka)
  Three Men in a Boat, ch.1.

He has no faith in physic. He does think Most of your doctors are the greater danger, And worse disease, t'escape.

-Jonson, Ben
  Volpone, act1, sc.4.

In the foreground is that strange figure which is as familiar to us as the figures of those among whom we havebeenbrought up, thegigantic body, thehugemassy face, seamed with the scars of disease, the brown coat, the black worsted stockings, the grey wig with the scorched foretop, the dirty hands, the nails bitten and pared to the quick.

-1st Baron
  Of Dr Samuel Johnson.'Croker's new edition of  The Life of Samuel Johnson', in the Edinburgh Review, Sep.

All men are lonely.But sometimes it seems tomethat we Americans are the loneliest of all.Our hunger for foreign places and new ways has been with us almost like a national disease.

-McCullers, (Lula) Carson ne¤  e Smith
  'Look Homeward,  Americans', in Vogue,1 Dec.