Jamison’s home page. “Empathy Exams” book description:
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 can we feel another’s pain, especially when pain can be assumed, distorted, or performed? 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.
Sunday NYT Book Review: Empathy Exams.
Jamison opens with her experience as an actor playing patients for medical students. “I’m called a standardized patient, which means I act toward the norms set for my disorders.” Sometimes, working from a script, she plays a mother whose baby’s lips are turning blue, and sometimes a young woman whose grief over her brother’s death manifests as seizures. The students are assessed on how empathically they respond to her character’s pain. Sensitive questioning elicits vital detail; clumsy handling causes the actor-patient to clam up.
Interview: Paris Review.
“I am human: nothing human is alien to me.”
“Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto.”
