The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

Name: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
Rating: 4 (1 reviews)
Author: Anne Fadiman
ISBN: 9780374525644

Anne Fadiman • 1997

Devastation Rating

Emotionally Ruined

medicine Hmong culture epilepsy

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Our Take

Lia Lee has epilepsy; her Hmong family believes the seizures are divine. Fadiman documents the collision of Western medicine and Hmong cosmology — two systems, each certain of its correctness, each failing the same child. There is no one to blame, which is the worst part.

Appears In

► The Body — What It Carries, What It Costs ► Medicine and Its Failures — The Gap Between Care and Cure ► Science and Ethics — When Knowledge Becomes Complicity ► Trauma — The Science and the Story

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