The Empathy Exams

Leslie Jamison's The Empathy Exams is a brave, incisive collection of essays that explores the many ways humans can feel one another's pain. In these insightful and deeply humane writings, Jamison reveals her own personal experiences of illness and bodily pain as she ventures beyond her own suffering to delve into the many ways we experience others' sorrow: through poverty tourism, phantom ailments, street violence, reality television, illness, and incarceration. Her exploration of our shared need to feel through addressing pain—real or imagined—is not only a brave attempt at exploring a form of vision molded by humility and grace; it is also an important step in understanding how empathy is used as a tool for evaluating or even grading one another.