Another good book recommended by my girlfriend that has some really good stuff in it.
“The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures” by Anne Fadiman. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 1997.
“Conquergood considered his ralation ship with the Hmong to be a form of barter, “a productive and mutually invigorating dialog , with neither side dominating or winning out.” In his opinionk, the physician asn nurses at Ban Vinai failed to win the cooperation of the camp inhabitants because they considered the relaationship one-sided, with the Westerners holding all the knowledge. As long as they perisited in theis view, Conquergood believed that what the medical establishment was offering would continue to be rejected since the Hmong would view it not as a gift, but as a form of coercion.” (37)
Two doctor, Peggy and Neil, on the non-compliance of parents to properly give medicine or follow any of their explicit directions.
“‘I remember wanting to shake the parents so that would understand,’ said Peggy. A handful of times Neil gave Foua (mother of child) ahug while Lia was seizing, but most of the time, while Lia wa between the ages of eighteen months and three and a half years, he was too angry to feel much sympathy toward either of her parents. “The best thing I could have given wasw compassion, and I wasn’t giving her any and I knew that I wasn’t giving her any, ” he said. “There was just too much aggravation. It was like banging your head against a wall constantly and not making any headway. There was the frustraion of the nighttime calls and the lenght of time it took and the amount of energy and sorrow and lack of control. I mean every time i saw Lia I would just, you know, it was light- ohhh, you would just get so frustrated! WHen she came to the emergency room in status there would be sort of like a very precipitious peak of anger, but it was quickly followed by the fear of a horribly sick child who was very difficult to put an IV in.” (56)
“I hovered uncertainly, pages in hand, and realized that I was suspended in a large bowl of Fish Soup. Medicine was religion. Religion was society. Society was medicine. Even economics were mixed up in there somewhere (you had to have enough or borrow enough money to buy a single pig, or even a cow, in case someone got sick and a sacrifice was required), and so was music (if you didn’t have a qeej player at your funeral, your soul wouldn’t be guided on its posthumous travels, and it couldn’t be reborn, and it might make your relatives sick). In fact, the Hmong view of health care seemed to me to be precisely the opposite of the prevailing American on , in which the practice of medicine has fissioned into smaller and smaller sub-specialties,k with less and less truck between bailiwicks.” (60)
Tags: books, quotes, the spirit catches you and you fall down
