{"id":40066,"date":"2016-01-09T00:29:00","date_gmt":"2016-01-08T23:29:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sonnenseite.com\/tips\/the-empathy-exams-essays.html"},"modified":"2016-01-09T00:29:00","modified_gmt":"2016-01-08T23:29:00","slug":"the-empathy-exams-essays","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sonnenseite.com\/en\/tips\/the-empathy-exams-essays\/","title":{"rendered":"The Empathy Exams: Essays"},"content":{"rendered":"

The subjects of this stylish and audacious collection of essays range from an assault in Nicaragua to a Morgellons meeting; from Frida Kahlo’s plaster casts to a gangland tour of LA. Jamison is interested in how we tell stories about injury and pain, and the limits that circumstances, bodies and identity put on the act of describing.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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? <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n