Acclaimed by reviewers, “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down” won a National Book Critics Circle Award. It has sold almost 900,000 copies, according to its publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and remains widely assigned in medical schools and in university classes in social work, anthropology, journalism and other fields.

As a result, Lia’s story, as few other narratives have done, has had a significant effect on the ways in which American medicine is practiced across cultures, and on the training of doctors.

“A lot of people in medicine were talking about that book for a very long time after it was published,” Sherwin B. Nuland, the physician and National Book Award-winning author, said on Wednesday. He added:

“There’s a big difference between what we call ‘disease’ and what we call ‘illness.’ A disease is a pathological entity; an illness is the effect of the disease on the patient’s entire way of life. And suddenly you read a book like this and you say to yourself, ‘Oh, my God; what have I been doing?’ ”

A labor of eight years, “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down” is also the story of the immense benefits of tradition, which can furnish, Ms. Fadiman makes clear, a level of familial devotion less often seen among modern Americans. Lia spent her entire life at home, assiduously cared for by her family, and it was this devotion, Ms. Fadiman came to feel, that kept her alive for so long.

“She was never shunted to the periphery,” Ms. Fadiman, the daughter of the author and television personality Clifton Fadiman and the journalist Annalee Jacoby Fadiman, said on Wednesday. “I remember her most in her mother’s arms. Family life went on around her and in some ways revolved around her.”

The 14th of 15 children born to her mother, Foua Yang, and her father, Nao Kao Lee, Lia Lee was born on July 19, 1982, in Merced, Calif. — the first of her parents’ children born in the United States, and the first born in a hospital. She was plump, porcelain-skinned, lively and beautiful.