Author Anne Fadiman says she greatly admires the physicians in her book “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down” and their tireless quest to treat a little girl with epilepsy.

She also considers Lia Lee’s parents, members of the Hmong community of refugees who fled the Laotian highlands for the U.S., equally admirable in their struggle to adhere to their cultural beliefs while trying to make the best decisions for their child.

“It’s a bunch of heroes who are flawed,” Fadiman says of her subjects.

“The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down” offers no perfect heroes, no real villains and no easy answers. It chronicles the sad story of the Lees and Lia’s doctors in Merced, Calif., and their inability to overcome the vast cultural divide between Western medical training and old Hmong traditions.

The University of Vermont and College of Medicine chose “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down” as the first-year summer reading assignment for incoming undergraduate and medical students. The author presented a keynote lecture for UVM College of Medicine and UVM Medical Center faculty and staff at noon September 15, 2015 in the Davis Center and presented to the broader university on September 15 at 7 p.m. in Ira Allen Chapel.

In her book, both sides make errors of judgment and action that drive the compelling and resonant story – which strongly suggests the need for a more holistic, culturally sensitive approach to the practice of medicine. And since “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down” was published in 1997, much has improved, Fadiman says.

“Times have changed, and the medical community has revised itself,” she says.

Fadiman would like to see more changes – which she will discuss in her lecture, she says. Without wanting to reveal too many details of what she plans to cover, the author says she will explain how she came to write about the Lees and the Merced, Calif. medical community.

Now living just north of Northampton, Mass., and a writer-in-residence and English professor at Yale University, Fadiman has spoken to many audiences of medical professionals, she says. They often ask whether she agrees with the decisions made in the book – the placement of Lia Lee in foster care, for example – and the alternatives she sees to those decisions.

Some in her medical audiences also wonder if she has altered the way she views or chooses her own doctors. Fadiman says she hasn’t changed her standards for medical competency, and adds that “I now also require a doctor that I can communicate with and that can treat me and my family as people and can convey some warmth.”

Those qualities aren’t hard to find among physicians, she admits. “They’re higher priorities than they used to be.”