Leslie Jamison

From personal loss to phantom diseases, The Empathy Exams is a bold and brilliant collection, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize A Publishers Weekly Top Ten Essay Collection of Spring 2014 Beginning with her experience as a medical actor who was paid to act out symptoms for medical students to diagnose, Leslie Jamison's visceral and revealing essays ask essential questions about our basic understanding of others: How should we care about each other? How can we feel another's pain, especially when pain can be assumed, distorted, or performed? Is empathy a tool by which to test or even grade each other? By confronting pain—real and imagined, her own and others'—Jamison uncovers a personal and cultural urgency to feel. She draws from her own experiences of illness and bodily injury to engage in an exploration that extends far beyond her life, spanning wide-ranging territory—from poverty tourism to phantom diseases, street violence to reality television, illness to incarceration—in its search for a kind of sight shaped by humility and grace.

Essays

The Empathy Exams

It's not enough for someone to have a sympathetic manner or use a caring tone. The students have to say the right words to get credit for compassion. 

This was the double blade of how I felt about anything that hurt: I wanted someone else to feel it with me, and I also wanted it entirely for myself

The author described a pulsing fist of fear and loneliness inside her - a fist she'd carried her whole life, had numbed with drinking and sex - and explained how her pregnancy had replaced this fist with the tiny bud of her fetus, a moving life

I felt the weight of expectation on every moment - the sense that the end of this pregnancy was something I 

 feel sad about, the lurking fear that I never felt sad about what I was supposed to feel sad about, the knowledge that I'd gone through several funerals dry eyed, the hunch that I had a parched interior life activated only by the need for constant affirmation, nothing more.

Which is to say: that kitchen held the ghosts of countless days that felt easier than the one we were living now.

I would tell her that commonality doesn't inoculate against hurt.

I had an insecurity that didn't know how to express itself; that could attach itself to tears or to their absence. 

. When of course the horse wasn't the problem. Dr. M became a villain because my story didn't have one. It was the kind of pain that comes without a perpetrator.

It offered assurance rather than empathy, or maybe assurance was evidence of empathy, insofar as he understood that assurance, not identification, was what I needed most. 

Empathy is a kind of care but it's not the only kind of care, and it's not always enough. I want to think that's what Dr. G was thinking. I needed to look at him and see the opposite of my fear, not its echo.

We care in order to be cared for. We care because we are porous. 

I found stray bits of hardened skin and weird threads - from bandages or who-knows-what? - and I read them like tea leaves to discern what made me feel so trapped in my own body. 

The Empathy Exams quotes

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