Better Words: Re-imagining Medical Experience in The Cancer Journals and "The Empathy Exams"

This paper asserts that Audre Lorde and Leslie Jamison usefully work to re-imagine the medical record in their respective The Cancer Journals and "The Empathy Exams." Their efforts to translate their bodily experience counters medical discourse's systematic and at times simplifying approach to documenting the body. Instead, Lorde's and Jamison's versions seek to acknowledge and amplify the patient as the primary liver and teller of these experiences, centering an emotional and embodied language. I suggest that, in doing so, Lorde and Jamison model ways to reckon with and reframe the narrative tools used to make sense of our bodies. Read together, The Cancer Journals and "The Empathy Exams" expand the narrative possibilities for how patients document and discern medical experiences. Such expanded options can empower us to better grasp-that is, better understand and better own-our experiences of medical care, in medical institutions and amid medical discourses.