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1-Page Summary of The Empathy Exams
Overall Summary
Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams is a collection of essays about what empathy means and how it relates to human suffering. It looks at the definition of empathy, its function in society, and how people react to suffering. These reactions are examined through both sick and healthy people with different social support networks.
The book’s essays are written in the first person and come from a variety of perspectives. For example, in “The Empathy Exams” Jamison speaks as an actor who plays a patient suffering from pain under examination by doctors-in-training. In another essay, she meets people with Morgellons disease who have collectively decided they’re afflicted with this condition that has not yet been medically identified or explained. Her two memoirs describe her experiences of physical pain due to illness and injury, as well as emotional trauma resulting from the death of several loved ones. The rest of the essays focus on other forms of pain outside ordinary experience—for example, extreme fatigue experienced by ultramarathoners and impending death felt by those facing their own demise.
Jamison’s writings focus on the pain that women share. She often talks about how society tries to ignore, regulate and even legislate female pain. In these sections, she validates female pain as a real human emotion that is equivalent to any other category of human emotions or impulses. She also focuses on the full range of human emotions in general as having intrinsic value because they make up part of every human self. Some people embrace this fact (even using it as social capital) while others repress it which usually has deleterious effects.
The latter part of The Empathy Exams discusses the difficulties in empathizing with others. It points out that society looks down on people who express their pain and suffering, which makes it difficult for them to get help. In particular, women are often ridiculed or made to feel alien when they express certain forms of pain. Women also have additional problems because they live in a sexist world where there is much pain related to entrenched social norms.
The Empathy Exams is a comprehensive survey of many modern forms of pain. It suggests that we will never fully document the limits and possibilities of any other human emotion as we continue to reshape our identities and environments. In this way, Jamison’s collection extols humanity’s capacity for pain while lamenting it at the same time because it gives life value.
