The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down is a well researched and organized book by Anne Fadiman that talks about how doctors and other medical professionals can take care of people with different cultures. The book has been well researched because the author collects information from various sources to show how people in the hospital treat these patients better.
In this essay I will be talking about how doctors and other medical professionals can take care of people with different cultures. I will also talk about what the author has done to collect information from various sources so they can show how people in the hospital treat these patients better.
Introduction
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down is a memoir written by author Anne Fadiman about the death of her niece, Lia. The book is separated into two parts. The first part of the book tells Fadiman’s story about her growing up. As she got older, she became more interested in the world around herself and that lead to her obsession with learning languages. This obsession then lead to her fascination with anthropology, which was what ultimately brought Lia into her life.
The second part of the book tells Fadiman’s story about how Lia entered their lives and how they struggled to help her catch up in school because she had missed out on so much due to medical issues at birth that left her non-verbal and unsteady on her feet.
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: Summary
In this book, the author tells the story of a Hmong family from Laos who immigrated to California and experienced a clash of cultures. The Hmong’s traditional reliance on healers and a belief in spiritual possession clashes with the Western medical system.
Specifically, it tells the story of Lia Lee, a child that struggled with catching every cold that came her way. Even though she was born in America, she still relies on her parents for many aspects of life because she doesn't understand English well. The doctors diagnose her as having epilepsy and prescribe strong medications to stop seizures from happening again.
Lia’s father doesn't want his daughter to be medicated because he believes it will take away her spirit and connections with their ancestors. He instead wants to try healing rituals.
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: Literary Analysis
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down is a transformative memoir of Hmong immigrants, written by the daughter of Dr. Anne Fadiman.
It is a story about Lia Lee, a child with epilepsy who has had her share of medical mishaps and the challenges she faces as a Hmong-American girl living in Fresno, California.
The book was published in 1997 and it won the National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction and it was also on The New York Times Best Seller List for 10 weeks.
Conclusion
The book highlights the importance of understanding culture to truly understand a diagnosis.
This book is about a family that moves to California from Laos, and how the cultural barrier creates distance and misunderstanding between the parents and their daughter that led to her death. With this in mind, we see that cultural barriers can be detrimental to health care and create misunderstandings in diagnosis.
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