We have all felt disgust, to one degree or another, in many contexts. PubMed Central, the full-text biomedical and life sciences archive from the National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine, offers the peer-reviewed article "Why Disgust Matters," from the journal Philosophical Transactions B. The article is an insight into this "powerful, but poorly-understood," feeling. Written by Valerie Curtis of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, "Why Disgust Matters" synthesizes ideas about how disgust as a system evolved to motivate infectious disease avoidance. It may seem obvious that disgust can be used to combat behavioral causes of infectious and chronic disease, but the article points out that disgust also plays a significant role in anxieties and phobias, has hidden costs for several fields of work, and can be abused to promote prejudice and stigma. This synthesis proposes that the study of disgust can help people flourish and provides a compelling model for the study of this very human emotion.