'Empathy Exams' Is A Virtuosic Manifesto Of Human Pain
Jamison is a pro at reading deeply, whether into wide-ranging sources such as Susan Sontag, Virginia Woolf, Lucy Grealy, Frida Kahlo, James Agee and Caroline Knapp, or into her personal experiences. She writes that since entering graduate school, "I looked back at my own life like text." Fortunately, she largely avoids abstruse pedagogy, although — striving to bring a measure of objective understanding to another painful, frightening experience — she fascinatingly applies academic methodology to an analysis of being punched in the face by a mugger in Nicaragua.
Jamison's attraction to the offbeat and dangerous keeps us agog. She attends a conference of Morgellons disease – characterized by the sensation of crawling insects and the extrusion of unidentifiable fibers from the skin — which doctors don't recognize as a disease and the CDC has labeled an "unexplained dermopathy." After making a concerted effort to mask her skepticism while talking with various attendees, she concludes, "This isn't an essay about whether or not Morgellons disease is real. That's probably obvious by now. It's an essay about what kinds of reality are considered prerequisites for compassion. It's about this strange sympathetic limbo: Is it wrong to call it empathy when you trust the fact of suffering, but not the source?"
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