The spirit catches you and you fall down : a Hmong child, her American doctors, and the collision of two cultures / Anne Fadiman.
Fadiman, Anne, 1953-
1997
RA418.5.T73 F33 1997 (Mapit)
Available at General Collection

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Title The spirit catches you and you fall down : a Hmong child, her American doctors, and the collision of two cultures / Anne Fadiman.
Author Fadiman, Anne, 1953-
Edition 1st ed.
ISBN 0374267812 (alk. paper)
9780374267810 (alk. paper)
Imprint New York : Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, c1997.
Language English
Description xi, 339 p. ; 25 cm.
Call Number RA418.5.T73 F33 1997
Dewey Decimal Classification 306.4/61
Summary 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 and 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.
Bibliography, etc. Note Includes bibliographical references and index.
Linked Resources Contributor biographical information
Publisher description
Record Appears in On-Campus Resources > Books
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Birth
Fish soup
The spirit catches you and you fall down
Do doctors eat brains?
Take as directed
High-velocity transcortical lead therapy
Government property
Foua and Nao Kao
A little medicine and a little neeb
War
The big one
Flight
Code X
The melting pot
Gold and dross
Why did they pick Merced?
The eight questions
The life or the soul
The sacrifice.

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