
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures
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Narrated by:
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Pamela Xiong
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By:
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Anne Fadiman
About this listen
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction
When three-month-old Lia Lee arrived at the county hospital emergency room in Merced, California, a chain of events was set in motion from which neither she nor her parents nor her doctors would ever recover. Lia's parents, Foua and Nao Kao, were part of a large Hmong community in Merced, refugees from the CIA-run "Quiet War" in Laos. The Hmong, traditionally a close-knit people, have been less amenable to assimilation than most immigrants, adhering steadfastly to the rituals and beliefs of their ancestors. Lia's pediatricians, Neil Ernst and his wife, Peggy Philip, cleaved just as strongly to another tradition: that of Western medicine.
When Lia Lee entered the American medical system, diagnosed as an epileptic, her story became a tragic case history of cultural miscommunication. Parents and doctors both wanted the best for Lia, but their ideas about the causes of her illness and its treatment could hardly have been more different. The Hmong see illness and healing as spiritual matters linked to virtually everything in the universe while medical community marks a division between body and soul and concerns itself almost exclusively with the former.
Lia's doctors ascribed her seizures to the misfiring of her cerebral neurons; her parents called her illness qaug dab peg - the spirit catches you and you fall down - and ascribed it to the wandering of her soul. The doctors prescribed anticonvulsants; her parents preferred animal sacrifices.
©1997 Anne Fadiman, Afterword copyright 2012 by Anne Fadiman (P)2015 Audible Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Story
In Being Mortal, best-selling author Atul Gawande tackles the hardest challenge of his profession: how medicine can not only improve life but also the process of its ending. Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming birth, injury, and infectious disease from harrowing to manageable. But in the inevitable condition of aging and death, the goals of medicine seem too frequently to run counter to the interest of the human spirit.
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A Walk through the Valley of the Shadow
- By George on 11-02-14
By: Atul Gawande
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Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife
- The Extraordinary Lives of Medieval Women
- By: Hetta Howes
- Narrated by: Amy Noble
- Length: 10 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife charts the lives and times of four medieval women writers—Marie de France, a poet; Julian of Norwich, a mystic and anchoress; Christine de Pizan, a widow and court writer; and Margery Kempe, a no-good wife—who all bucked convention and forged their own paths. Largely forgotten by modern readers, these women have an astonishing amount to teach us about love, marriage, motherhood, friendship, and earning a living.
By: Hetta Howes
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The People's Hospital
- Hope and Peril in American Medicine
- By: Ricardo Nuila MD
- Narrated by: Ricardo Nuila MD
- Length: 10 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Where does one go without health insurance, when turned away by hospitals, clinics, and doctors? In The People’s Hospital, physician Ricardo Nuila’s stunning debut, we follow the lives of five uninsured Houstonians as their struggle for survival leads them to a hospital where insurance comes second to genuine care.
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Ben Taub Nurse
- By Patricia Gonzales on 05-11-23
By: Ricardo Nuila MD
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The Masters of Medicine
- Our Greatest Triumphs in the Race to Cure Humanity's Deadliest Diseases
- By: Andrew Lam
- Narrated by: Jason Vu
- Length: 10 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Human history hinges on the battle to confront our most dangerous enemies—the half-dozen diseases responsible for killing almost all of mankind. The story of our medical triumphs reveals an inspiring tapestry of human achievement, but the journey was far from smooth. It is a tale replete with dramatic episodes as spellbinding as any blockbuster Hollywood movie. In The Masters of Medicine, Dr. Andrew Lam, an award-winning author and retinal surgeon, distills the long arc of medical progress down to the crucial moments that were responsible for the world's greatest medical miracles.
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Medical history comes to life
- By Clayton on 11-04-23
By: Andrew Lam
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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
- By: Rebecca Skloot
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell, Bahni Turpin
- Length: 12 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells - taken without her knowledge - became one of the most important tools in medicine: The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, which are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than 60 years. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb’s effects.
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The Secret Life of an American Cancer Cell
- By Cynthia on 08-10-13
By: Rebecca Skloot
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Complications
- A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science
- By: Atul Gawande
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 9 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Sometimes in medicine the only way to know what is truly going on in a patient is to operate, to look inside with one's own eyes. This audio is exploratory surgery on medicine itself, laying bare a science not in its idealized form, but as it actually is - complicated, perplexing, and profoundly human. Atul Gawande offers an unflinching view from the scalpel's edge, where science is ambiguous, information is limited, the stakes are high. In dramatic and revealing stories of patients and doctors, he explores how deadly mistakes occur and why good surgeons go bad.
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FALLIBILITY, MYSTERY AND UNCERTAINTY
- By AnnH on 10-04-20
By: Atul Gawande
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The Next One Is for You
- A True Story of Guns, Country, and the IRA's Secret American Army
- By: Ali Watkins
- Narrated by: Jennifer Woodward
- Length: 11 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Northern Ireland, 1975. Violence has erupted on the streets of Belfast. After years as a guerilla army, the IRA is clashing with Loyalist gangs and heavily armed British soldiers. But the Troubles have spilled beyond the island: An ocean away, in the heart of Philadelphia’s Irish enclave, a teenage girl finds a letter in her mailbox. Inside is a bullet, and the message is clear: The next one is for you or your family. As reporter Ali Watkins reveals, the conflict in Northern Ireland might have gone very differently had it not been for a small ragtag band of gunrunners in the United States.
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I knew people who supported IRA from the states
- By Michael M. McMahon on 05-27-25
By: Ali Watkins
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Rough Sleepers
- Dr. Jim O’Connell’s Urgent Mission to Bring Healing to Homeless People
- By: Tracy Kidder
- Narrated by: Tracy Kidder
- Length: 8 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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After Jim O’Connell graduated from Harvard Medical School and was nearing the end of his residency at Massachusetts General, the hospital’s chief of medicine made a proposal: Would he defer a prestigious fellowship and spend a year helping to create an organization to bring health care to homeless citizens? That year turned into O’Connell’s life’s calling. Tracy Kidder spent five years following Dr. O’Connell and his colleagues as they work with thousands of homeless patients, some of whom we meet in this illuminating book.
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I could not stop listening!
- By Paul on 01-28-23
By: Tracy Kidder
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The Laws of Medicine
- By: Siddhartha Mukherjee
- Narrated by: Santino Fontana
- Length: 1 hr and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Brimming with fascinating historical details and modern medical wonders, this important audiobook is a fascinating glimpse into the struggles and "eureka!" moments that people outside of the medical profession rarely see. Written with Dr. Mukherjee's signature eloquence and passionate prose, The Laws of Medicine is a critical book not just for those in the medical profession but for everyone who is moved to better understand how their health and well-being are being treated.
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Insightful, sincere and succinct. Not Mukherjee's best.
- By Saurav on 12-20-15
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Napoleon's Hemorrhoids…And Other Small Events That Changed History
- By: Phil Mason
- Narrated by: LJ Ganser
- Length: 8 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Hilarious, fascinating, and a roller coaster of dizzying, historical what-ifs, Napoleon's Hemorrhoids is a potpourri for serious historians and casual history buffs. In one of Phil Mason's many revelations, you'll learn that Communist jets were two minutes away from opening fire on American planes during the Cuban missile crisis, when they had to turn back as they were running out of fuel. You'll discover that before the Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon's painful hemorrhoids prevented him from mounting his horse to survey the battlefield.
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They just throw the facts too fast
- By Concerned_llama on 12-11-20
By: Phil Mason
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Nickel and Dimed
- On (Not) Getting By in America
- By: Barbara Ehrenreich
- Narrated by: Cristine McMurdo-Wallis
- Length: 8 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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This engrossing piece of undercover reportage has been a fixture on the New York Times best seller list since its publication. With nearly a million copies in print, Nickel and Dimed is a modern classic that deftly portrays the plight of America's working-class poor.
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Good concept, but poor execution.
- By Marco Forcone on 08-24-04
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Spillover
- By: David Quammen
- Narrated by: Jonathan Yen
- Length: 20 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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The emergence of strange new diseases is a frightening problem that seems to be getting worse. In this age of speedy travel, it threatens a worldwide pandemic. We hear news reports of Ebola, SARS, AIDS, and something called Hendra killing horses and people in Australia - but those reports miss the big truth that such phenomena are part of a single pattern. The bugs that transmit these diseases share one thing: they originate in wild animals and pass to humans by a process called spillover. David Quammen tracks this subject around the world.
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Fascinating, but not Riveting
- By L. M. Roberts on 03-08-14
By: David Quammen
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Where Rivers Part
- A Story of My Mother's Life
- By: Kao Kalia Yang
- Narrated by: Pamela Xiong, Kao Kalia Yang
- Length: 12 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Born in 1961 in war-torn Laos, Tswb’s childhood was marked by the violence of America’s Secret War and the CIA recruitment of the Hmong and other ethnic minorities into the lost cause. By the time Tswb was a teenager, the US had completely vacated Laos, and the country erupted into genocidal attacks on the Hmong people, who were labeled as traitors. Fearing for their lives, Tswb and her family left everything they knew behind and fled their village for the jungle.
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Soul touching and deep
- By M on 04-22-24
By: Kao Kalia Yang
cultural understandment
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Read this!
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Updated Edition
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Amazing
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Excellent read, very informative.
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Loved it. The book is well written and I love it.
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Phenomenal book, reading with some errors
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A great book for interpreters
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The narrator was great!!
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Pure humanity and a look at another world of culture
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