The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down Analysis

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The Spirit Catches You, and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman is a story about a Hmong child named Lia who suffers from epilepsy. She and her family live in Merced, California. Since Lia was born to parents Foua and Nao Kao, she started to have seizures and in the Hmong community the belief was that if something was physically or emotionally wrong with anyone it was because their soul wasn’t doing ok. As they kept taking Lia to the ER at the Mercer’s California Medical Center between the ages of 8 months to about 4 years, they quickly learned the struggle between not only their language barrier but their cultural belief system and the American Western Medical System. One of the doctors working on Lia’s case, Dr. Neil Ernst, filed a report to