Beginning with her experience as a medical actor who was paid to act out symptom
s for medical students to diagnose, Leslie Jamison's visceral and revealing essa
ys ask essential questions about our basic understanding of others: How should w
e care about each other? How can we feel another's pain, especially when pain ca
n be assumed, distorted, or performed? Is empathy a tool by which to test or eve
n 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 ow
n experiences of illness and bodily injury to engage in an exploration that exte
nds far beyond her life, spanning wide-ranging territory--from poverty tourism t
o phantom diseases, street violence to reality television, illness to incarcerat
ion--in its search for a kind of sight shaped by humility and grace.
