The Empathy Exams: Essays

By: Leslie Jamison

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Synopsis: From personal loss to phantom diseases, a bold and brilliant collection, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize
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.

Book Quality:: Excellent
Book Size:: 240 Pages
ISBN-13:: 9781555976712
Publisher:: Graywolf Press
Date of Addition:: 05/21/14
Copyrighted By:: Leslie Jamison
Adult content:: No
Language:: English
Has Image Descriptions:: No
Categories:: Nonfiction, Health, Mind and Body, Literature and Fiction, Psychology, Medicine
Submitted By:: Worth Trust
Proofread By:: Worth Trust
Usage Restrictions:: This is a copyrighted book.