In the rare free moments she has had this year between visiting Ebola centres in west Africa and pleading for support in front of the UN, Dr Joanne Liu, international president of Médecins Sans Frontières, reread The Plague by Albert Camus. Unsurprisingly, it had extra resonance this time. She was particularly struck by the narrator Dr Rieux’s statement that he keeps going because he has never managed to get used to seeing people die. Telling me this, she pauses. “I think today it’s one of our problems. Somehow we got used to death and then we dehumanised it. We account for conflicts in figures. Ebola is 13,500 infected, 5,000 people have died… People are losing their sense of empathy, their sense of wanting to do something.”
身为无国界医生组织(MSF)的国际主席，廖满嫦医生(Dr Joanne Liu)今年颇为忙碌，她不时要前往西非的埃博拉疫区，还要赴联合国(UN)请求支援，不过她还是忙里偷闲重读了阿尔贝•加缪(Albert Camus)所著的《鼠疫》(The Plague)。不出所料，这次阅读让她感触更深了。她尤其被书中的叙述者李欧医生(Dr Rieux)的自白所打动：他之所以能坚持下去，是因为他始终不习惯看到人们死去。说到这里，她停顿了一下，接着说道：“我觉得这是我们现在的一个问题。我们不知怎么就习惯了死亡，在对待死亡问题上变得没有了人情味。我们用数字来说明事故。埃博拉病毒已造成13500人感染，5000人死亡……人们正在失去同情心，没有了想要做点什么的心思。”