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Digital Audiobook
The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison

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The Empathy Exams

Publisher
Hachette Audio
Publish Date
2 December 2025
Run Time
11 hours 22 minutes
Format
Audiobook
$13.95

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What to expect

From personal loss to phantom diseases, The Empathy Exams is a bold and brilliant collection.

A Publishers Weekly Top Ten Essay Collection of Spring 2014


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 bodily injury to engage in an exploration that extends far beyond her life, spanning wide-ranging territory―from poverty tourism to phantom diseases, street violence to reality television, illness to incarceration―in its search for a kind of sight shaped by humility and grace.

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Details

Author
Leslie Jamison
Narrator
Leslie Jamison
Duration
11 hours 22 minutes
Release Date
2 December 2025
ISBN
9781668655085
Format
Audiobook
Publisher
Hachette Audio
Genre
Biography: adventurers and explorers, Biography: writers, Literary essays

Synopsis

From personal loss to phantom diseases, The Empathy Exams is a bold and brilliant collection. A Publishers Weekly Top Ten Essay Collection of Spring 2014 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 bodily injury to engage in an exploration that extends far beyond her life, spanning wide-ranging territory―from poverty tourism to phantom diseases, street violence to reality television, illness to incarceration―in its search for a kind of sight shaped by humility and grace.

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