A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors and the Collision of Two CulturesAuthor: Anne Fadiman
Subject: Nonfiction, medicine, Laos
Keywords: Hmong culture, epilepsy
My rating: 4*
Awards: Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction
About the book:
The book explores the Hmong population in Merced County, California. Following the case of Lia (a Hmong child with a progressive and unpredictable form of epilepsy), Fadiman maps out the controversies raised by the collision between Western medicine and holistic healing traditions of Hmong immigrants. Unable to enter the Laotian forest to find herbs for Lia that will "fix her spirit," her family becomes resigned to the American emergency system, which has little understanding of Hmong animist traditions. The author reveals the rigidity and weaknesses of these two ethnographically separated cultures.
From the book:
'For the residents and pediatricians who had cared for her [Lia] since she was three months old, there was no guide to Lia's world except her chart. As each of them struggled to make sense of a set of problems that were not expressible in the language they knew, the chart simply grew longer and longer, until it contained more than 400,000 words. Every one of those words reflected its author's intelligence, training and good intentions, but not a single one dealt with the Lee's [family's] perception of their daughter's illness.'
'Ask not what disease the person has, but rather what person the disease has.' William Osler
' Our view of reality is only a view, not reality itself.'
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