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According to pathogen-avoidance perspectives on disgust, injuries, gore, mutilation, or body-envelope violations elicit disgust because they have infectious potential. Here, an alternative explanation is proposed: People empathically simulate an observed injury, leading to unpleasant vicarious feelings, and for lack of a more accurate word, they describe the feelings as disgust. In Study 1, factor analysis of participants’ disgust ratings showed that injury items emerged as a separate factor from pathogen items. A behavioral experiment in Study 2 demonstrated that subjects were less willing to touch dressings that had ostensibly been in contact with infections compared with dressings that had contacted equally disgusting injuries, suggesting that the disgust reported toward injuries is not based on an appraisal of contamination threat. Analysis of participants’ subjective feeling descriptions in Study 3 revealed that injury …