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Author Fadiman, Anne, 1953-

Title The spirit catches you and you fall down : a Hmong child, her American doctors, and the collison of two cultures / Anne Fadiman.

Publication Info. New York : Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012.
©1997

Copies

Location Call No. Status
 Farmington, Main Library - Teen Department  TEEN 306.46 FAD    DUE 05-30-24 Billed
 New Britain, Main Library - Non Fiction  306.461 FAD    Check Shelf
 South Windsor Public Library - Non Fiction  306.461 FADIMAN    Check Shelf
Edition Paperback edition.
Description ix, 355 pages ; 21 cm
Note Reprint. Originally published: New York : Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1997.
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages [327]-340) and index.
Note Includes new afterword by the author.
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.
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 proud 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.
Subject Transcultural medical care -- California -- Case studies.
Hmong American children -- Medical care -- California.
Hmong Americans -- Medicine.
Intercultural communication.
Epilepsy in children.
Child -- Laos -- Case Reports.
Epilepsy -- Laos -- Case Reports.
Attitude of Health Personnel -- Laos -- Case Reports.
Cross-Cultural Comparison -- Laos -- Case Reports.
Emigration and Immigration -- Laos -- Case Reports.
Infant -- Laos.
ISBN 9780374533403: $15.00
0374533407
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