Health & Cultural Competency

A generation of clinicians met the Hmong through Anne Fadiman's The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, and this shelf exists for the readers that book keeps sending: nurses, doctors, social workers, and students assigned it in training. It holds accounts of what happens when Western medicine and Hmong understandings of illness meet without translation. Read Fadiman, then read Hmong-authored work alongside her, because cultural competency starts with who gets to narrate.