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Peggy Philp
A family practice resident at Merced Community Medical Center who is interested in Hmong culture. Dan is the first doctor to diagnose Lia as epileptic after seeing her in the throes of a seizure during her third visit to the hospital. Dan is devoted to learning about the Hmong people, even inviting various Hmong leaders to come to the hospital to tell the doctors about their experiences as refugees in an effort to open the lines of cross-cultural communication. Even so, he is unable to effectively communicate with the Lees about Lia’s condition or medication.
Dan Murphy Quotes in The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
The The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down quotes below are all either spoken by Dan Murphy or refer to Dan Murphy. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 3
Quotes
Although the inklings Dan had gathered of the transcendental Hmong worldview seemed to him to possess both power and beauty, his own view of medicine in general, and of epilepsy in particular, was, like that of his colleagues at MCMC, essentially rationalist. Hippocrates’ skeptical commentary on the nature of epilepsy, made around 400 B.C., pretty much sums up Dan’s own frame of reference: “It seems to me that the disease is no more divine than any other. It has a natural cause just as other diseases have. Men think it is divine merely because they don’t understand it. But if they called everything divine which they do not understand, why, there would be no end to divine things.”
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Chapter 5
Quotes
And the other thing that was different between them and me was that they seemed to accept things that to me were major catastrophes as part of the normal flow of life. For them, the crisis was the treatment, not the epilepsy. I felt a tremendous responsibility to stop the seizures and to make sure another one never happened again, and they felt more like these things happen, you know, not everything is in our control, and not everything is in your control.
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Dan Murphy Quotes in The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
The The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down quotes below are all either spoken by Dan Murphy or refer to Dan Murphy. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 3
Quotes
Although the inklings Dan had gathered of the transcendental Hmong worldview seemed to him to possess both power and beauty, his own view of medicine in general, and of epilepsy in particular, was, like that of his colleagues at MCMC, essentially rationalist. Hippocrates’ skeptical commentary on the nature of epilepsy, made around 400 B.C., pretty much sums up Dan’s own frame of reference: “It seems to me that the disease is no more divine than any other. It has a natural cause just as other diseases have. Men think it is divine merely because they don’t understand it. But if they called everything divine which they do not understand, why, there would be no end to divine things.”
Related Characters:
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Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5
Quotes
And the other thing that was different between them and me was that they seemed to accept things that to me were major catastrophes as part of the normal flow of life. For them, the crisis was the treatment, not the epilepsy. I felt a tremendous responsibility to stop the seizures and to make sure another one never happened again, and they felt more like these things happen, you know, not everything is in our control, and not everything is in your control.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
