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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.
  
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• Author/Creator:Fadiman, Anne, 1953-
  
• Published/Created:New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998, c1997.
  

• Holdings

  Holdings Record Display

  • Location: c.1  Temporarily shelved at KOERNER LIBRARY reserve collection (Floor 3)Where is this?
    
  • Call Number: WA30 .F335 1997a
    
  • Number of Items:1
    
  • Status:Available
    

   
• Library of Congress Subjects:Transcultural medical care--California--Case studies.
  Hmong American children--Medical care--California.
  Hmong Americans--Medicine.
  Intercultural communication.
  Epilepsy in children.
  
• Medical Subjects: Epilepsy--Child.
  Cross-Cultural Comparison.
  Emigration and Immigration--Laos.
  Attitude of Health Personnel.
  
• Genre/Form:Case studies.
  
• Edition:1st paperback ed.
  
• Description:ix, 341 pages ; 21 cm.
  
• 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 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.
  
• Notes:"Reader's guide": pages [343]-[348].
  Includes bibliographical references (p. [313]-326) and index.
  
• ISBN:0374525641 (pbk.)
  0374267812 (cloth : alk. paper)
  
• Contents: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.