Leslie Jamison: The Empathy Exams (lecture)

Drawing on her experience as a medical actress, paid to simulate symptoms that medical students were asked to diagnose, Leslie Jamison's visceral and revealing essays ask essential questions about our fundamental understanding of each other: how should we care for each other? others ? How can we feel the pain of others, especially when the pain can be assumed, distorted, or performed? Is empathy a tool for testing, or even rating, each other?

In confronting pain – real and imagined, his own and that of others – Jamison discovers a personal and cultural urgency to feel. She draws on her own experiences of illness and bodily injury to engage in an exploration that extends well beyond her life, covering a vast territory – from poverty tourism to phantom illnesses, from the violence of street to reality TV, from illness to incarceration – in his search for a kind of vision shaped by humility and grace. “The Empathy Exams” is a brilliant and impactful book written by one of this country's most important young writers.

Leslie Jamison attended Harvard, Yale, and the Iowa Writer's Workshop. Her first novel, “The Gin Closet,” was published by Free Press in 2010. Her second book, “The Empathy Exams,” a collection of essays published by Graywolf Press, debuted at no. 11 on the New York Times bestseller list. It was widely praised by critics, with the New York Times saying, "it's hard to imagine a stronger, more thoughtful voice emerging this year."

This video was recorded on June 2, 2015.

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