The Empathy Exams is a daring and powerful book that covers everything from personal tragedy to phantom ailments, and it won the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize.
Leslie Jamison's visceral and illuminating articles, which begin with her experience as a medical actress who was paid to play out symptoms for medical students to diagnose, pose crucial concerns about our basic knowledge of others: How should we be concerned about one another? How can we experience someone else's sorrow when it might be assumed, twisted, or performed? Is empathy a tool for evaluating or even grading one another? Jamison reveals a personal and societal drive to feel through addressing pain—real and imagined, her own and others'. She draws on her own personal experiences of illness and bodily pain to go on a journey that spans a wide range of topics—from poverty tourism to phantom ailments, street violence to reality television, illness to incarceration—in quest of a form of vision molded by humility and grace.
Empathy isn’t just listening, it’s asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to. Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires knowing you know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see.
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