雙語·當呼吸化為空氣 這些病人是自愿免費捐獻遺體的

當然，活著的時候，這些病人是自愿免費捐獻遺體的——我們面對這些尸體，用詞也很快變成這種現實的反映。教授告訴我們，不要再“尸體尸體”地叫，最好說“捐獻者”。當然，如今的解剖課堂比過去那些黑暗的年代進步很多了。（首先，現在的學生不用像十九世紀那樣，自己帶尸體來。醫(yī)學院也不再支持去挖人家的墳找尸體。不過挖墳的行為本身，相比直接謀殺已經是巨大進步了。后者曾經特別流行，甚至有個詞應運而生，“burke”，《牛津英語詞典》上的解釋是：“用勒頸或使人窒息的方式秘密殺人，或為了將受害者尸體賣為解剖之用而秘密殺人?！保┤欢?，知道個中細節(jié)最多的人，也就是醫(yī)生們，幾乎很少捐獻自己的遺體。那捐獻者們到底又知道多少呢？一位解剖學教授對我說：“如果血淋淋的過程細節(jié)會讓病人不同意手術，那你一個字都不能說。”
Of course, the cadavers, in life, donated themselves freely to this fate, and the language surrounding the bodies in front of us soon changed to reflect that fact. We were instructed to no longer call them“cadavers”; “donors” was the preferred term. And yes, the transgressive element of dissection had certainly decreased from the bad old days.(Students no longer had to bring their own bodies, for starters, as they did in the nineteenth century. And medical schools had discontinued their support of the practice of robbing graves to procure cadavers—that looting itself a vast improvement over murder, a means once common enough to warrant its own verb: burke, which the OED defines as “to kill secretly by suffocation or strangulation, or for the purpose of selling the victim’s body for dissection.”) Yet the bestinformed people—doctors—almost never donated their bodies. How informed were the donors, then? As one anatomy professor put it to me, “You wouldn’t tell a patient the gory details of a surgery if that would make them not consent.”

不過這只是一個解剖學教授說的話，捐獻者們知道的信息應該還是足夠多的。不過就算他們知道了，真正感到屈辱的，不是這些最終被解剖的人，而是他們的親屬。你想想，你的母親、你的父親、你的祖父母，被一群插科打諢的二十二歲醫(yī)學生給大卸八塊。每次我讀實驗前的計劃，看到“骨鋸”這一類的詞匯，都會想，這堂課上我是不是最終會吐出來。然而，真正走進實驗室，我卻很少煩惱，就算發(fā)現此前令我坐立不安的“骨鋸”不過就是一把生銹的普通木頭鋸子。有一次我真的快吐了，但離實驗室很遠，是祖母去世二十周年，我去紐約給她掃墓時的事。當時我情不自禁地彎下腰，幾乎要哭了，不停地道歉，不是對我曾經解剖過的尸體，而是對那具尸體的孫輩。事實上，就在我們實驗的過程中，有位兒子就希望把他母親解剖到一半的尸體要回去。是的，母親是簽了同意書的，但兒子接受不了。我覺得我也和他一樣。（尸體最后還給他了。）
Even if donors were informed enough—and they might well have been, notwithstanding one anatomy professor’s hedging—it wasn’t so much the thought of being dissected that galled. It was the thought of your mother, your father, your grandparents being hacked to pieces by wisecracking twenty-two-year-old medical students. Every time I read the pre-lab and saw a term like “bone saw,” I wondered if this would be the session in which I finally vomited. Yet I was rarely troubled in lab, even when I found that the “bone saw” in question was nothing more than a common, rusty wood saw. The closest I ever came to vomiting was nowhere near the lab but on a visit to my grandmother’s grave in New York, on the twentieth anniversary of her death. I found myself doubled over, almost crying, and apologizing—not to my cadaver but to my cadaver’s grandchildren. In the midst of our lab, in fact, a son requested his mother’s half-dissected body back. Yes, she had consented, but he couldn’t live with that. I knew I’d do the same. (The remains were returned.)

解剖實驗中，死者被具體化，真正被分解成器官、組織、神經、肌肉。第一天，你的確無法否認尸體身上的人性。然而，等到你給他們的手腳剝了皮，割開礙事的肌肉，拿出肺臟，剖開心臟，摘除一片肺葉，你很難再說這一堆東西是“人”了。最終，你會覺得，與其說解剖實驗是對神明的冒犯，倒不如說這是歡樂時光中一件不那么愉快的事情。這種意識令人產生挫敗感。很偶爾地，我們可能會反思，大家都在默默地向尸體道歉，并非出于罪惡感，而是出于我們沒有罪惡感。
In anatomy lab, we objectified the dead, literally reducing them to organs, tissues, nerves, muscles. On that first day, you simply could not deny the humanity of the corpse. But by the time you’d skinned the limbs, sliced through inconvenient muscles, pulled out the lungs, cut open the heart, and removed a lobe of the liver, it was hard to recognize this pile of tissue as human. Anatomy lab, in the end, becomes less a violation of the sacred and more something that interferes with happy hour, and that realization discomfits. In our rare reflective moments, we were all silently apologizing to our cadavers, not because we sensed the transgression but because we did not.