![]() At age three months Lia had had her first epileptic seizure-as the Lees put it, ``the spirit catches you and you fall down.'' Lia's treatment was complex-her anticonvulsant prescriptions changed 23 times in four years-and the Lees were sure the medicines were bad for their daughter. In the Lees' view, Lia's soul had fled her body and become lost. Fadiman, a columnist for Civilization and the new editor of the American Scholar, met the Lees, a Hmong refugee family in Merced, Calif., in 1988, when their daughter Lia was already seven years old and, in the eyes of her American doctors, brain dead. ![]() ![]() A vivid, deeply felt, and meticulously researched account of the disastrous encounter between two disparate cultures: Western medicine and Eastern spirituality, in this case, of Hmong immigrants from Laos. ![]()
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