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.”
身爲無國界醫生組織(MSF)的國際主席，廖滿嫦醫生(Dr Joanne Liu)今年頗爲忙碌，她不時要前往西非的埃博拉疫區，還要赴聯合國(UN)請求支援，不過她還是忙裏偷閒重讀了阿爾貝•加繆(Albert Camus)所著的《鼠疫》(The Plague)。不出所料，這次閱讀讓她感觸更深了。她尤其被書中的敘述者李歐醫生(Dr Rieux)的自白所打動：他之所以能堅持下去，是因爲他始終不習慣看到人們死去。說到這裏，她停頓了一下，接著說道：「我覺得這是我們現在的一個問題。我們不知怎麼就習慣了死亡，在對待死亡問題上變得沒有了人情味。我們用數字來說明事故。埃博拉病毒已造成13500人感染，5000人死亡……人們正在失去同情心，沒有了想要做點什麼的心思。」