Throughout the book, we see Lia’s Hmong family constantly questioning the doctor’s intention as the doctors uselessly battle against the family’s inability to carry out instructions. Lia’s own family believed her seizures were caused by her soul leaving her body, which could be returned to her via animal sacrifice.
The Hmong culture, as Fadiman illustrates, therapeutically centres around Animism. You as a western doctor are the one with the foreign practice, and even with someone’s belief in their complete complacency, such terms are relative across cultural borders. This person will, therefore, be a subjective participant. Language is inextricably linked to culture, and as a physician, inevitably you will come across a few patients who will bring with them a friend or family member who will be acting as an interpreter. In an age where we love to write about medical incompetence, Fadiman chooses a much more corrosive subject: incompatibility.
Fadiman brilliantly roasts us over a slow flame by revealing the family’s agony in tandem with the doctor’s feelings of futility. We watch Lia, the little Hmong girl diagnosed with epilepsy, slowly fade from this world with every seizure. The journalist Anne Fadiman takes you through the maddeningly frustrating journey of a loving Hmong family and their dedicated western doctors. ‘The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down’ is the literal translation of the Hmong terminology for an epileptic seizure. I finished it and discovered my initial assumptions those years past were wrong. How could a story of one female child from a remote culture I had never heard of, (the Hmong people from Laos,) situated in a small community in the United States mean anything? Recently, the book found it’s way back to me. Stories like this one almost always get overlooked on our quest for world disease eradication. With blinders on, we convince ourselves this goal has the utmost virtue, and we get swept away by its potential. Like so many of my generation, while studying, we place ourselves on a definitive trajectory to our desired goal. A few years back in university, a friend of mine in medical school gave me a book to read.
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