1.       "There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact." Mark Twain from Life on the Mississippi
 

2.    "Men die of the diseases which they have studied most... it's as if the morbid condition was an evil creature which, when it found itself closely hunted, flew at the throat of its pursuer." - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle from Round the Red Lamp, "the Surgeon Talks"
 

3.       Diseases of Learned Men - Excerpts from Diseases of Tradesmen, 1700

                Bernardo Ramazzini is arguably the father of occupational medicine and therefore the   grandfather of occupational epidemiology. His book Diseases of Tradesman published in 1700 feature descriptions of illnesses associated with particular occupations. Of course, epidemiologists were not included, but "learned men" - professors, doctors, and the mathematicians - were represented, and, in Ramazzini’s mind, subject to a variety of maladies.  Many of today's epidemiologists fall into one of these three categories. Here are a few quotes:

                Professors: "... all through the winter and spring they lecture from their platforms till they are hoarse, trying to instruct young students, and at the end of the season they demonstrate by their uneasy and asthmatic condition what serious ailments of the chest can be caused by such a strain on the voice."

                 Doctors: "Doctors, however, fare much better; they are not attacked by so many diseases, and when they do fall ill, they set it down to running about so much and not to a sedentary life or too much standing... This I could not ascribe to any particular precautions on their part, but rather to their taking a good deal of exercise and to their cheerful frame of mind when they go home with their pockets full of fees."

                Mathematicians (Statisticians): "Mathematicians have to ponder and demonstrate the most     abstruse problems far removed from material existence, and to this end the mind must be kept  detached from the senses and have hardly any dealings with the body; hence they are nearly all dull, listless, lethargic, and never quite at home in the ordinary affairs of men."
 

4.       We are always dealing with dirty data. The trick is to do it with a clean mind." - Michael Gregg
 

5.       "The only way to keep your health is eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd rather not." - Mark Twain
 

6.       "Some people are so sensitive they feel snubbed if an epidemic overlooks them." - Frank (Kin) Hubbard (1868-1930)
 

7.       "Statistics are curious things. They afford one of the few examples in which the use, or abuse, of mathematical methods tends to induce a strong emotional reaction in non-mathematical minds. This is because statisticians apply, to problems in which we are interested, a technique which we do not understand. It is exasperating, when we have studied a problem by methods that we have spent laborious years mastering, to find our conclusions questioned, and perhaps refuted, by someone who could not have made the observations himself. It requires more equanimity than most of us possess to acknowledge that the fault is in ourselves." - Sir Austin Bradford Hill, Lancet, 1937
 

8.       The Nature of Probability: "The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings his neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken." - Bertrand Russell
 

9.       "The Government is very keen on amassing statistics. They collect them, add them, raise them to the nth power, take the cube root and prepare wonderful diagrams. But what you must never forget is that every one of those figures comes in the first instance from the village watchman, who just puts down what he damn pleases." - Sir Josiah Stamp, 1929