God's Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine

By Victoria Sweet

Book Overview

Victoria Sweet's new book, SLOW MEDICINE, is on sale now For readers of Paul Kalanithi's When Breath Becomes Air, a medical "page-turner" that traces one doctor's "remarkable journey to the essence of medicine" ( The San Francisco Chronicle ). San Francisco's Laguna Honda Hospital is the last almshouse in the country, a descendant of the H tel-Dieu (God's hotel) that cared for the sick in the Middle Ages. Ballet dancers and rock musicians, professors and thieves--"anyone who had fallen, or, often, leapt, onto hard times" and needed extended medical care--ended up here. So did Victoria Sweet, who came for two months and stayed for twenty years. Laguna Honda, relatively low-tech but human-paced, gave Sweet the opportunity to practice a kind of attentive medicine that has almost vanished. Gradually, the place transformed the way she understood her work. Alongside the modern view of the body as a machine to be fixed, her extraordinary patients evoked an older idea, of the body as a garden to be tended. God's Hotel tells their story and the story of the hospital itself, which, as efficiency experts, politicians, and architects descended, determined to turn it into a modern "health care facility," revealed its own surprising truths about the essence, cost, and value of caring for the body and the soul.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1594486549
• ISBN13: 9781594486548
• Release Date: April 2013
• Publisher: Riverhead Books
• Length: 432 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.4" x 8.1"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher