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Podcast: Between The Covers : Conversations with Writers in Fiction, Nonfiction & Poetry
Episode: Leslie Jamison : The Empathy Exams
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 should we care about each other? How can we feel another’s pain, especially when pain can be assumed, distorted, or performed? Is empathy a tool by which to test or even grade each other? 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 bodi...