Her goal, she told the Paris Review, was to “blend the professional texture of journalism with the weird feeling of someone peeling off a Band-Aid in front of you.” But even as she documented the pain of others, the through-line was her own suffering: her history of anorexia, drinking, and self-cutting and the nebulous sadness she felt over an abortion she’d had several years earlier. Jamison investigated empathy as a cultural phenomenon, shining a light on those who are not always granted it: the incarcerated, the violent, victims of phantom diseases. Jamison churned out 11 more essays in a self-financed reportorial whirlwind that took her from the teaching hospital to Tijuana to the hills of Tennessee and eventually to the halls of Graywolf Press, the Minneapolis-based publisher that acquired The Empathy Exams. I’m probably going to write about this in a book someday!”Īnd she did. As the medical students flow in to diagnose her, Jamison can hardly resist spilling the beans: “I want to tell them I’m more than just an unmarried woman faking seizures for pocket money,” she wrote. Jamison wasn’t just impersonating a sick person but impersonating the sort of person who gets paid to impersonate a sick person. The Standardized Patient in a crinkly blue gown was actually a Pacific Palisades–raised, Harvard- and Yale-educated whiz kid on a glittery comet trail of achievement. In retrospect, there was a double layer to Jamison’s play-acting.
“My job title is Medical Actor, which means I play sick,” Jamison wrote in the widely admired essay. For $13.50 an hour, Jamison would feign the symptoms of preeclampsia, moan on her side in a fetal position, or try to stay straight-faced as she expressed concern about the doll she was cradling: “He’s just so quiet.” Four years ago, a 30-year-old writer named Leslie Jamison published an essay in The Believer titled “The Empathy Exams.” In it, she described her life as a cash-strapped grad student moonlighting as a “Standardized Patient” to make ends meet.
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