The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
Subtitle: A Hmong child, her American doctors, and the collision of two cultures
By: Anne Fadiman
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
Published: 1997
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 339
Subjects: Lee, Lia; Hmong.; Merced Community Medical Center (CA).; Child; Epilepsy; Asian Americans; Attitude; Communication; Complementary Therapies; Cultural Diversity; Disease; Home Care Services; Medicine, Traditional; Parent-Child Relations; Patient Care; Patient Compliance; Persistent Vegetative State; Physicians; Professional-Family Relations; Professional-Patient Relations; Religion; Social Values; Attitude of Health Personnel; Cross-Cultural Comparison; Emigration and Immigration; Infant; Family Relations; Hospitals; Labor, Obstetric; Nurses; Social Work; Treatment Refusal; Vietnam Conflict; Laos; California; United States
Description: 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.

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 the 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.

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down moves from hospital corridors to healing ceremonies, and from the hill country of Laos to the living rooms of Merced, uncovering in its path the complex sources and implications of two dramatically clashing worldviews.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [311]-324) and index.

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