（三等奖作品）

Original text

In Illness as Metaphors, Susan Sontag traced the influence of metaphors associated with diseases —tuberculosis and cancer, in particular — and how they were applied to sick people so relentlessly that they sometimes obscured the nature of the illnesses. It was said, at the turn of the last century, that people contracted TB due to “too much passion,” whereas, half a century later, people were said to get cancer due to psychological repression or “insufficient passion.” Sontag wrote, “My point is that illness is not a metaphor, and that the most truthful way of regarding illness —and the healthiest way of being ill — is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking.” From 1989, she brought the same conviction to the AIDS epidemic, showing how, as the dominant metaphors had it, people became ill because the disease was a divine punishment. She concluded, “With this illness, one that elicits so much guilt and shame, the effort to detach it from loaded meanings and misleading metaphors seems particularly liberating, even consoling,” Sontag’s word suggests that metaphors of illness are malign in a double way: they cast opprobrium on sick people and they hinder the rational and scientific apprehension that is needed to contain disease and provide care for people. To treat illness as a metaphor is to avoid or delay or even thwart the treatment of literal illness. Our own situation is different, but not unrelated. Our disinclination to see viruses as literal may have kept us from insisting on and observing the standards and practices that would prevent their spread. Enthralled with virus as metaphor and the terms associated with it — we ceased to be vigilant. Jetting around the world, we stopped washing our hands.

Translated text

在《疾病的隐喻》一书中，苏珊·桑塔格追踪了与疾病、特别是与结核和癌症有关的隐喻的影响，以及这些隐喻是如何被无情地应用到病人身上，有时甚至掩盖了疾病的本质。据说，在上个世纪初，人们因为“太过热情”而染上结核病，然而半个世纪后，人们又因为心里压抑或“缺乏热情”而患上癌症。桑塔格写道：“我的观点是，疾病并不是一种隐喻。对待疾病最真实的方式也是生病最健康的方式是一种最纯粹、最顽固的隐喻思维。”自1989年起，她将同样的信念带到对艾滋病的流行的研究中，展示了最常见的隐喻是如何解释艾滋病的病因的——疾病是神的惩罚。她总结道，“这个疾病引起如此多的内疚和羞愧，为将它（这种疾病）与过度解读和误导性的隐喻分离而做出的努力就显得令人非常释然，甚至是欣慰。”桑塔格的话表明疾病的隐喻是一种双重中伤：他们不仅对病人进行谴责，也阻碍了控制疾病和为人们提供治疗与护理所需要的合理、科学的理解。将疾病看作是一种隐喻是为了避免、拖延甚至是阻挠对于字面意义上的疾病的治疗。我们自己的处境有所不同，但并不是完全没有关系的。我们不愿意从字面上看待病毒，这可能会使我们无法坚持和遵守防止病毒传播的标准和做法。在被隐喻中的病毒和与其相关的事物所迷惑后，我们便不再警惕了。若真如此，乘飞机环游世界之后，我们也不会洗手了。