Rationality In Western Culture

Western culture’s fascination with the thinking rationally stems back to the seventeenth and eighteenth century intellectual movement: The Enlightenment. The term rational is defined as “based on or derived from reason or reasoning, esp. as opposed to emotion, intuition, instinct, etc” (Oxford). Rationality was heralded as the answer to all problems and the path to a perfect society; while these views are considered extreme in today’s culture, reason is still viewed as mostly infallible. In The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman, the Merced doctors treating Lia were raised and educated in a Western culture that taught the superiority and successfulness of using logic to deduce problems, so when they are faced with the “irrational’ …show more content…
When Hmong patients came into the hospital, their traditions and customary means of healing were ignored by doctors, even when they would not impact the Western medicine being practiced. There was no allowance for the use of homeopathic remedies while in the hospital and these practices were looked down upon by the medical staff when used outside the hospital. Foua told Fadiman that “If we did a little of [western and eastern] she didn 't get sick as much, but the doctors wouldn 't let us give just a little medicine because they didn 't understand about the soul” (Fadiman 100). The doctors would not listen to the pleas of the Lee family to alter the medicinal regimen to compensate for the homeopathic healing because they believe that western medicine is unfailing. This stubbornness born of false rationality is one of the factors that led to Lia’s final …show more content…
After Lia had been to the hospital numerous times with seizures, the doctors stopped trying to see what else was wrong and just began to treat her seizures. Logically to them, whenever Lia came to the hospital she would be seizing and that’s all they would see, like Bill Selvidge said: “But this was Lia. No one at MCMC would have noticed anything but her seizures. Lia was her seizures” (Fadiman 256). Rationally it made sense to the doctors to begin treating Lia’s seizures immediately without testing for any other problems because that would take time away from treating Lia. This is what led to Lia’s brain damage and vegetative state because the doctors missed her septic shock which is what caused her ‘death’. Selvidge says that “if it had been a brand new kid walking off the street, I guarantee you Neil would have done a septic workup and he would have caught it” (Fadiman 256). The doctors had the ability to find and treat what caused Lia’s vegetative state, but they did not do it because it did not cross their minds that Lia was suffering from anything but another seizure. Lia’s doctors thought they were treating Lia to the best of their ability, but their rational approach caused them to look at the problem in such a way that it caused Lia’s brain