Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures

By: Anne Fadiman

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Paperback | 24 April 2012 | Edition Number 3

At a Glance

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368 Pages

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22.5 x 14 x 2.5

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Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction

When three-month-old Lia Lee Arrived at the county hospital emergency room in Merced, California, a chain of events was set in motion from which neither she nor her parents nor her doctors would ever recover. Lia's parents, Foua and Nao Kao, were part of a large Hmong community in Merced, refugees from the CIA-run "Quiet War" in Laos. The Hmong, traditionally a close-knit and fiercely people, have been less amenable to assimilation than most immigrants, adhering steadfastly to the rituals and beliefs of their ancestors. Lia's pediatricians, Neil Ernst and his wife, Peggy Philip, cleaved just as strongly to another tradition: that of Western medicine. When Lia Lee Entered the American medical system, diagnosed as an epileptic, her story became a tragic case history of cultural miscommunication.

Parents and doctors both wanted the best for Lia, but their ideas about the causes of her illness and its treatment could hardly have been more different. The Hmong see illness aand healing as spiritual matters linked to virtually everything in the universe, while medical community marks a division between body and soul, and concerns itself almost exclusively with the former. Lia's doctors ascribed her seizures to the misfiring of her cerebral neurons; her parents called her illness, qaug dab peg--the spirit catches you and you fall down--and ascribed it to the wandering of her soul. The doctors prescribed anticonvulsants; her parents preferred animal sacrifices.

Industry Reviews

"Superb, informal cultural anthropology--eye-opening, readable, utterly engaging." --Carole Horn, The Washington Post Book World

"This is a book that should be deeply disturbing to anyone who has given so much as a moment's thought to the state of American medicine. But it is much more . . . People are presented as [Fadiman] saw them, in their humility and their frailty--and their nobility." --Sherwin B. Nuland, The New Republic

"The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down changed how doctors see themselves and how they see their patients. Anne Fadiman celebrates the complexity and the individuality of the human interactions that make up the practice of medicine while simultaneously pointing out directions for change and breaking readers' hearts with the tragedies of cultural displacement, medical limitations, and futile good intentions." --Perri Klass, M.D., author of A Not Entirely Benign Procedure

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Preface	p. vii
Birth	p. 3
Fish Soup	p. 12
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down	p. 20
Do Doctors Eat Brains?	p. 32
Take as Directed	p. 38
High-Velocity Transcortical head Therapy	p. 60
Government Property	p. 78
Foua and Nao Kao	p. 93
A Little Medicine and a Little Neeb	p. 106
War	p. 119
The Big One	p. 140
Flight	p. 154
Code X	p. 171
The Melting Pot	p. 181
Gold and Dross	p. 210
Why Did They Pick Merced?	p. 225
The Eight Questions	p. 250
The Life or the Soul	p. 262
The Sacrifice	p. 278
Afterword to the Fifteenth Anniversary Edition	p. 289
Note on Hmong Orthography, Pronunciation, and Quotations	p. 305
Notes on Sources	p. 307
Bibliography	p. 327
Acknowledgments	p. 341
Index	p. 345
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures

At a Glance

Paperback

Industry Reviews

Shipping

How to return your order

Defective items

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