Blog Post #3: Leslie Jamison “Devil’s Bait”
In Devil’s Bait, Jamison gives us an alternative way of understanding and relating to others with different experiences than us. Jamison talks about how you can feel empathy for someone, even if you haven’t gone through the same experience. When she spoke to Dawn, one of the Morgellon patients, Jamison says “though I also feel how every attempt to metaphorize the illness is also an act of violence–an argument against the bodily reality its patient insists upon” (Jamison, 226). She says so to explain how as she was trying to relate to their situation and experience with the Morgellon disease, she is focusing on the emotional aspect and overlooking or casting a shadow over the experience itself. She is comparing her discomfort or dislike with how her body looks to those who have Morgellons. She understands how they feel when they are embarrassed or don’t like how they look because she feels the same way about her body. Her telling them nothing is wrong with how they look, or when she tells them they look beautiful doesn’t help make them feel any better. But with doing so, she is not addressing the actual experiences that makeup Morgellons. This only shifts away from finding a cure for their suffering.
This way of relating and understanding of empathy is different from Ma’s definition of empathy. Ma defines empathy as one’s ability to put themselves in someone else’s shoes. In contract, Jamison thinks you don’t have to have the same experience as someone else’s to be able to understand and empathize with them. We do see some overlap with Jamison’s and Bloom’s definitions of empathy. Bloom thinks when you empathize with someone, you feel their pain and you pick up their anxieties and sufferings. We do see Jamison experiencing those things after leaving the conference. With also Bloom’s idea of empathy leading to bias. Jamison acknowledges the existence of the bias between the patients and the doctors. With doctors being thought of as the bad and biased people and the people that are suffering as the victims. This can make it hard to empathize with either side because of the uncertainty of the disease.
Jamison’s approach to understanding people who have profoundly different experiences from her challenges both Ma and Bloom’s understanding. Ma thinks people will empathize when they have had similar experiences as someone else. Bloom thinks people should be more rational than emotional and that empathy can be good or bad depending on the experiences. Jamison, on the other hand, talks about how empathy can be possible by stating how she’s not experiencing Morgellon but still being able to feel their pain. She also talks about how the people with Morgellon look out for each other for help and are finding it comforting to open up and feel each other’s suffering. She uses Kendra, one of the patients she meets at the conference, as an example of how they not only empathize with each other but someone can understand how doctors and people that aren’t experiencing their pain feel and react the way they do.
