Empathy Exams Book Report

Leslie Jamison wrote a book called “The Empathy Exams”. She begins the book with her own personal experience as a medical actor who got paid for acting out symptoms for medical students to diagnose. In this book, the author mainly puts her focus on compulsory questions about how people can understand each other and can relate to one another. These questions include; How should we understand each other? How can we relate to someone’s pain even when the pain can be assumed and acted out? Throughout this book, Leslie Jamison is trying to identify how empathy can show, connect, or bring people closer to one another. All of her essays have a similar theme that trying to comprehend what people actually mean when they say that they feel someone

My favorite quote from this book, “Empathy isn’t just listening, it’s asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to. Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires knowing that you know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see… Empathy means realizing no trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. Out of wounds and across boundaries. Sadness becomes seizure. Empathy demands another kind of porousness in response.” To me it felt like this is a very important part of the book because it shows that the author knows what empathy is and she is willing to share it with her audience, which makes her extremely viable source. She knows what pain is and she knows how to notice when someone is experiencing it. For example, when she pregnant she wanted the attention from her husband. She was so exhausted and just needed a little comfort from him. Unfortunately, she felt like he wasn’t there. He would yell at her and ignore her. He didn’t realize or chose not to realize that she was carrying his baby and just needed a little support so she won’t feel alone.

The Empathy Exams was an outstanding book because it teaches its readers to understand people the way you would like to be understood. Realizing that sometimes every human being needs a little love and support when undergoing something difficult in their lives. We don’t know what people