Fadiman Essay

The book The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down was written by Anne Fadiman, a reporter, editor and Professor at Yale University. The book was published in 1997 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in New York and later republished in 2012 as paperback by the same publisher. It currently goes for around $12 in many stores and websites. The book is an nonfiction work that documents the author Anne Fadiman during her time with a Hmong refugee family who immigrated to United States after Vietnam and the clash

these barriers and roadblocks can be much scarier – and in some cases even deadly. These barriers are not limited to only language, but also to differences in cultures as well. The book entitled The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman highlights the plight of a particular Hmong family in California. The Lee family faced many hardships when they came to America. They were normally mountain people who kept to themselves and did their “own thing” without any interference or input

While reading “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down,” written by Anne Fadiman, I found how interesting it was to learn about the history of the Hmong people. These groups of people have been through a lot in history, and they fought to keep their culture alive when the Chinese people attacked them for not assimilating to their culture. The Hmong people have different birthing tradition then those of Americans. The Hmong people believed in “Dabs,” which is evil spirits that can steal the baby’s

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman is about the cross-cultural ethics in medicine. The book is about a small Hmong child named Lia Lee, who had epilepsy. Epilepsy is called, quag dab peg1 in the Hmong culture that translates to the spirit catches you and you fall down. In the Hmong culture this illness is sign of distinction and divinity, because most Hmong epileptics become shaman, or as the Hmong call them, txiv neeb2. These shamans are special people imbued with healing spirits

within the village can easily access to the opposite part once they can access the Internet. However, the border between geographic may be weakened while the border between culture still exists. The book Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman tells us a true story of culture shock regarding health care. I am impressed and touched by the story very much. In this book, the author described a tragic story about a Hmong girl Lia. The conflict and difference between western treatment and

perpetuate the feeling of anxiety. Now think about those migrants who could not speak and understand the language, how do you think they would feel living in an unfamiliar place like America? The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman, dare us to ponder what we assume we know about health care and what are the ultimate challenges that influenced the way patients were treated in a hospital. The book also helps us opens our understanding on how different people practice or observe

Book Review In this complicated and heartbreaking book about a “cultural impasse” that started in the small county hospital of Merced, California, Anne Fadiman presents us the story of how a Hmong girl suffering from severe epilepsy brought to light what happens when the American medical community fails to see patients as people whose cultural background is completely different from their own. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down tells the story of Lia Lee. Lia was barely three months old when

Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, I have discovered that although both of the books are written about medical ethics within different cultures and both Fadiman and Skloot side with the patients being treated, the two authors have different argumentation styles and ways of building their arguments. Fadiman writes in a Rogerian argumentation style while Skloot is more Aristotelian and Fadiman uses inductive reasoning while Skloot

The Difference Between the Life and the Soul “Which is more important, the life or the soul?” (277). This was a reoccurring topic that was present throughout the novel, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. In this nonfiction novel by Anne Fadiman, cultural conflict arises between the modern Western culture and the “stone age” Hmong culture when the Hmongs were forced to seek refuge in the United States. Due to contrasts in customs, language, and beliefs, the two groups found it difficult, but

Summary of The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down In ‘The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down’, Lia, a Hmong baby girl, is born to a Hmong family living in California as refugees away from their war torn land in Laos. In Laos the Lee’s where farmers and lived in the country according to their Hmong traditions and beliefs. In California they barely understood the language, much less Western culture or medicinal practices. In Hmong tradition, illness was seen as a spiritual problem rather than