For Sara Levine, “the worst thing an essayist can do is fail to make an impression.” Jamison’s “The Empathy Exams” did nothing but the exact opposite of that: it made a great impression with the author’s memoir about her part time job that kept herself from being broke for “being a writer.”
She opened her essay with a description of her experience as a medical actor, “My job title is Medical Actor, which means I play sick. I get paid by the hour. Medical students guess my maladies.” After playing out the patient role for medical students, she had to rank their “diagnosis” based on essentially accuracy, but more importantly, compassion. To get full credit for their empathetic capacity, the students had “to say the right words,” as demonstrating “a sympathetic manner or use a caring tone of voice” was simply not good enough. The student had to make Jamison feel empathized, in other words.
Jamison explains empathy as “a penetration, a kind of travel” that “suggests you enter another person’s pain as you’d enter another country through immigration and customs.” The author used her memoir of the part-time college job to guide her audience through the “examination” in how we sympathize with each other’s suffering, physically and emotionally. Throughout the essay, Jamison raised many compelling questions about empathy that normally avoided, such as “Why not say, I couldn’t even imagine?” instead of “that must really be hard.”
Having undergone many injuries in her life, the author was able to put herself out for our examination so that she could challenge and provoke her readers with her ultimate perception of sympathy: in order to understand others’ feelings and allow them to become our own feelings, we must sacrifice our own contentment and tranquility. Jamison’s personal bodily and intellectually experience were delivered so honestly, it would be hard not to relate to Stephanie Phillps or Leslie Jamison’s agony, as Sara Levine said, we should “leave the essay feeling as if you have met somebody.”