num_pages: 230
description: From personal loss to phantom diseases The Empathy Exams is 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 Jamisons visceral and revealing essays ask essential questions about our basic understanding of others: How should we care about each other? How can we feel anothers 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 painreal and imagined her own and othersJamison 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 territoryfrom poverty tourism to phantom diseases street violence to reality television illness to incarcerationin its search for a kind of sight shaped by humility and grace.
language: English
title: The Empathy Exams
publisher: Graywolf Press