Fiona Pardington: Host

This was just the beginning of me snooping around in medical text books. Posters from a particularly reprehensible book on tropical medicine by an English doctor who I would have liked to have strangled. He was so racist and so full of himself it was unbelievable but I suppose that’s just part of colonisation really and the thing that made this particularly sad was that this was a sexually transmitted disease so I think it’s a syphilitic chancre on the tongue, but look at the way he or she is photographed. The person is looking up, the photograph is taken above from a position of superiority and seems to be supplicant. So immediately for me it looked religious, I imagined the person at the front of the line at a Catholic church having the host popped on his tongue and straight away everything seemed to make sense to me because it explained so much about the whole idea of colonising a people – their bodies are colonised, their language is taken away from them, they have other gods introduced to them and theirs are removed from them, and they’re taken to their knees as disease decimates them. So really religion is like a colonial vector.

这张相片可以说是我对医学教科书探索的开端，它是一个英国医生著述的关于热带疾病的书中所附录的图片。这个英国医生让我有想要掐住他颈项的冲动，因为他是如此的种族主义，如此的高傲自大，但是说到底这些只是当时殖民地时代西方共有的情结。这张照片让人叹息的原因是，它的主角是一个性病患者，这可以从他（她）舌部出现的梅毒初期的结瘤看出来。但值得注意的是这张照片的拍摄方法，主角向上看着，似是在乞求援助。而摄影师则居高临下充满怜悯之情地俯视着主角。我觉得殖民主义和照片中表现的医学情状有着某种联系。这张照片从性病病毒侵占宿主的角度全方位地解释了殖民主义的传播。殖民地原著民的身体被占有，语言被取缔，然后他们在病痛中对殖民者卑躬屈膝。