Note: This essay contains spoilers for Avatar: The Way of Water. There’s little I love more than surprise neurology in mainstream media. One such surprise occurred recently when one of the main characters in Avatar: The Way of Water has a seizure. Seizures are the proverbial bread and butter of pediatric neurology, and while…
Tag: epilepsy
Reframing the Cultural Clash: A Literary, Disability Studies Reading of “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down”
Anne Fadiman’s 1997 bestselling narrative nonfiction, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures, meticulously outlines the story of Lia Lee. Lia was a young Laotian refugee diagnosed with and unsuccessfully treated for severe epilepsy over the course of her childhood in California…