"The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down changed how doctors see themselves and how they see their patients. Anne Fadiman celebrates the complexity and the individuality of the human interactions that make up the practice of medicine while simutaneously pointing out directions for change and breaking readers' hearts with the tragedies of cultural displacement, medical limitations and futile good intentions."   

     - Perri Klass, M.D., author of A Not Entirely Benign Procedure

 

"This is a book that should be deeply disturbing to anyone who has given so much as a moment's thought to the state of American medicine. But it is much more... People are presented as [Fadiman] saw them, in their humility and their fraility- and their nobility."       

       -Sherwin B. Nuland, The New Republic

 

"Superb, informal culural anthropology- eye opening, readable, utterly engaging."         

       -Carole Horn, The Washington Post Book World