The piece also functions as a frame along with the final essay, "Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain".
As a study in vulnerability, but also in types of speech and silence that surround the ailing body, The Empathy Exams is exceptional, Jamison concluding that empathy is a matter of the hardest work, "made of exertion, that dowdier cousin of impulse". Jamison match-cuts these scenes with an account of her own heart surgery and an abortion: the latter made more traumatic by a seemingly callous comment from one of her physicians. Her title essay is an account of time spent as a paid medical actor, not only feigning symptoms but working up the backstory and motivations of her character, presenting that history to trainee doctors whose degree of empathic response is depressingly rote-learned. The Morgellons essay crystallises what Jamison does very well: forensic attention to corporeal detail and self-aware reflection on the extent to which she, or any of us, can imagine life in another body. But at length she retreats to her hotel pool and a sense, however provisional, of her own physical integrity. How to properly hear such confessions? Jamison has her own dermatological horror stories – a maggot in the ankle, no less – and understands the Morgellons patient's loneliness, disgust and fugue-state vigilance. The tales are uniformly dismal: brittle, pretty women who have scratched their faces raw couples and families united by pain and the guilt of contagion the uninsured resorting to draughts of veterinary-grade dewormer. Jamison passes swiftly over the online epidemic and instead fetches up at a Morgellons conference in Austin, Texas, where she listens rapt and then ashamed to the stories of patients and advocates. It's a test case for human affinity in the face of manifest but indefinable suffering. To Leslie Jamison – whose essay collection includes pieces on extreme running, gangland tours and the history of saccharin, but is at its disconcerted best when describing bodily predicaments – the "disease" was and remains something more. Morgellons was a template instance of medical anxiety in the internet age. To journalists too: before long it seemed every enterprising US feature writer was poring itchily over online accounts of symptoms and the struggle for acceptance. Morgellons disease – the name derived from a passing reference by the 17th-century physician Sir Thomas Browne – appeared to the professional gaze an impure emanation of Google-borne hypochondria.
A little over a decade ago a number of Americans began to report a novel and alarming disorder: they itched like the damned, convinced that tiny threads or fibres were poking from their skin, or that they were infested with minuscule creeping things.
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