The Empathy Exams

Learning How to Show Empathy

Leslie Jamison begins with her work as a medical actor, playing standardized patients for doctors in training. These performances are tightly scripted. Each character comes with symptoms, personal history, habits, fears, and emotional cues, all designed to test whether a future doctor can do more than identify a diagnosis. One item on the student checklist asks whether the student voiced empathy, and that small phrase captures a larger problem: care can become something rehearsed, measurable, and mechanical.

Real empathy asks for more than the correct sentence in the correct tone. It requires curiosity about what pain means inside another person’s life. A seizure may not be only a seizure. It may also be grief, panic, history, and loneliness moving through the body. Pain rarely stays in one category, and understanding someone means following the way emotional suffering spills into physical symptoms and changes the shape of a life.

That lesson becomes more urgent when Jamison writes about her own body. She remembers an abortion, heart surgery, and the humiliations of needing help while not receiving the kind of care she wanted. A doctor’s coldness and a partner’s doubt made her feel as if her pain had become embarrassing evidence against her. Instead of being met with trust, she was made to feel dramatic, mistaken, or excessive.

These experiences sharpen the book’s view of empathy as labor rather than instinct. It is not mind reading, and it is not the projection of our own feelings onto someone else. It means admitting how much we do not know, then staying anyway. Sometimes that care appears in words, and sometimes it appears in steadiness, patience, and the refusal to turn away.

Empathy also carries risk. It can slide into intrusion, self-congratulation, or fantasy. People often prefer pain that makes sense to them, because confusing pain asks more of them. Jamison keeps returning to the harder version of care: believing in suffering even when its meaning is unclear, and resisting the temptation to reduce another person’s life to a neat explanation.