The Lord will smite you with consumption, and with fever, inflammation, and fiery heat, and with drought, and with blasting, and with mildew; and they shall pursue you until you perish.

 

—Deuteronomy 28:22

 

Yet the captain of all these men of death that came against him to take him away was the consumption, for ’twas that that brought him down to the grave.

 

—John Bunyan, The Life and Death of Mr. Badman (1680)

 

Tuberculosis—the disease which destroyed more than five million lives last year, whose indiscriminate path through man’s recorded history has filled more graves than war, famine, or pestilence—has been stopped.

 

—From the radio broadcast Science on the March (1953)

 

No matter how carefully we scour the world for substances that kill bacteria and viruses, eventually we are going to lose the battle.

 

—Robert Baker, Quiet Killers: The Fall and Rise of Deadly Diseases (2008)