The germs of disease and the hungry tiger are both determined upon the same objective—your destruction—one by eating you in "chunks" and the other by minutely gnawing you away "piecemeal."
The results are identical.
It is not necessary to moralize upon the difference.
But this we know, that in our present scheme of life, as Ingersoll so eloquently states, "The hands that help are better far than lips that pray."
Our bodies are as much "meat" for the disease germs that eat us as the animal that furnishes the meat for our appetites.
Or as Shakespeare puts it:
"... in the sweetest bud
The eating canker dwells."
In a broader and more comprehensive concept of disease, Shakespeare says, it is, as if a