Life & Wisdom Quote by Peter Lewis Allen

The sting in Allen's line is the casualness of the cruelty: sickness becomes not just a condition but a verdict. By pairing "the sick" with "lepers", he reaches for a historically loaded shorthand - leprosy as the archetypal disease of social exile, a medical fact transformed into moral theater. The phrase "Even more than this, however" suggests he's building on an already grim catalog, then sharpening it into something worse than suffering itself: blame.

The intent is less to document pathology than to indict a social reflex. "Reviled" isn't mere avoidance; it's active contempt. And the rationale he attributes to "people" - that sufferers "had brought their torments upon themselves" - exposes a psychological bargain. If pain is self-inflicted, then the healthy can feel protected, even righteous. It's an early version of the just-world fantasy: disaster happens to the deserving, which means it won't happen to me.

Subtextually, the line is about the convenience of moralizing. Societies often prefer a story of fault over the uncomfortable randomness of illness, because fault creates categories: pure/impure, prudent/reckless, us/them. That logic also authorizes distance. You don't have to help someone if you can narrate their misery as payment.

Context matters here: the comparison to lepers points to eras when medicine was limited and theology filled the gaps, turning disease into proof of spiritual failure. Allen isn't romanticizing that past; he's showing how quickly ignorance turns into condemnation - a mechanism that, in updated forms, still shadows modern public health and stigma.