在资本主义社会里，对军事隐喻的滥用，可能在所难免，这个社会越来越限制着道德原则诉求的广度和可信度，在这个社会里，如果一个人的行为不服从于对自我利益和赢利的计算，则会被认为愚不可及。而战争是硕果仅存的少数几种被认为不应该以“现实”眼光加以看待的行为；（……）在那种倾其所有的全面战争中，付出也是倾其所有的，毫不犹豫的——战争被定义为一种紧急状态，牺牲再大，也不过分。不过，对疾病的战争（……）还提供了一种看待疾病的方式，即把那些特别可怕的疾病看作是外来的“他者”，像现代战争中的敌人一样；把疾病妖魔化，就不可避免地发生这样的转变，即把错误归咎于患者，而不管患者本人是否被认为是疾病的牺牲品。牺牲品意味着无知。而无知，以支配一切人际关系词汇的那种无情逻辑来看 (by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms)，意味着犯罪。 (查看原文)
(Eng. p.103) Although European and Japanese doctors still regularly impart a cancer diagnosis first to the family, and often counsel concealing it from the patient, American doctors have virtually abandoned this policy; indeed, a brutal announcement to the patient is now common. The new candor about cancer is part of the same obligatory candor (or lack of decorum) that bring us diagrams of the rectal-colon or genitourinary tract ailments of our national leaders on television and on the front pages of newspapers - more and more it is precisely a virtue in our society to speak of what is supposed not (斜体) to be named. The change can also be explained by the doctors’ fear of lawsuits in a litigious society. (查看原文)
(Eng. p.120) “Infected but not ill,” that invaluable notion of clinical medicine (the “harbors” many infections), is being superseded by biomedical concepts which, whatever their scientific justification, amount to reviving the antiscientific logic of defilement, and make infected-but-healthy a contradiction in terms. Being ill in this new sense can have many practical consequences. People are losing their jobs when it is learned that they are HIV-positive (though it is not legal in the United States to fire someone for that reason) and the temptation to conceal a positive finding must be immense. (查看原文)
与赋予结核病的那种温柔的死形成对比，艾滋病和癌症一样，导致难堪的死。缠绕着集体想象力的所有那些被隐喻化的疾病，无一例外都将导致难堪的死，或被认为将导致难堪的死。有性命之虞，这本身并不足以引发恐惧。（……）人们恐惧癌症更甚于恐惧心脏病，（……）患心脏病是一个事件，但它并不给患者带来一种新身份，使患者变成“他们” (“them”) 中的一员。
(p.113) (Eng. p.126) The most terrifying illnesses are those perceived not just as lethal but as dehumanizing, literally so. (查看原文)
(Eng. p.127) Polio’s effects could be horrifying - it withered the body - but it did not mark or rot the flesh: it was not repulsive. Further, polio affected the body only, though that may seem shin enough, not the face. The relatively appropriate, unmetaphorical reaction to polio owes much to the privileged status of the face, so determining of our evaluation of physical beauty and of physical ruin. (…) (p.128) Our very notion of the person, of dignity, depends on the separation of face from body, on the possibility that the face may be exempt, or exempt itself, from what is happening to the body.
(p.129) 小儿麻痹症这种更晚出现的流行病也不被视为瘟疫。这些流行病之所以不使人联想到瘟疫的观念，其中一个原因是，它们并不完全具备人们长期以来赋予瘟疫的那些属性（例如，小儿麻痹症被解释为尤其见于小儿的病，即无辜者的病）。 (查看原文)
（……）正当“通病” (generic sickliness) 这个范畴被有关致病原因的极其具体性的新知识从十九世纪的医学思维中清除出来时，它却移入了心理学这个日益扩大的领域。本来是身体患病的人却成了患神经衰弱症 (neurasthenic) 或神经官能症 (neurotic) 的人。有关一种被有机物所污染、客观上存在着致病性的环境 (an organically contaminated, objectively pathogenic environment) 的观点，又一次出现在心理学的这一观念中，即认为存在着一种已遭到心理污染的气氛 (ambiance)，它容易导致心理疾患的产生。
这一观点并不局限于心理学领域里，随着心理学新近获得了作为科学的可信度，它又返回来重新影响医学。人们普遍持这种观点，即众多的疾病，或者甚至是大多数的疾病，并非真正的“身体”疾病，而是心理疾病（比较保守地说，是“身心失调”） (that many or even most diseases are not “really” physical but mental (more conservatively, “psycho-somatic”))，这种看法，再加上其对病因和意义的过多的解释，以一种新的样式使瘴气说的形式永恒化了，在二十世纪获得了登峰造极的成功。 (查看原文)
(Eng. p.134) In contrast to cancer, understood in a modern way as a disease incurred by (and revealing of) individuals, AIDS is understood in a premodern way, as a disease incurred by people both as individuals and as members of a “risk group” - that neutral-sounding, bureaucratic category which also revives the archaic idea of a tainted community that illness has judged. (查看原文)
(Eng. p.138) Plagues are no longer “sent,” as in Biblical and Greek antiquity, for the question of agency has blurred. Instead, peoples are “visited” by plagues. (…) Even for non-Europeans, lethal disease may be called a visitation. But a visitation on “them” is invariably described as different from one on “us.” (…) (p.139) Thus it is believed that Asians (or the poor, or blacks, or Africans, or Muslims) don’t suffer or don’t grieve as Europeans (or whites) do. The fact that illness is associated with the poor - who are, from the perspective of the privileged, aliens in one’s midst - reinforces the association of illness with the foreign: with an exotic, often primitive place. (查看原文)
