Victoria Sweet
San Francisco's Laguna Honda Hospital is the last almshouse in the country, a descendant of the ,HÃ´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, lower 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 body and soul.
Nonfiction,Health,Medicine,Autobiography,Memoir,Medical,History,Health,Biography,Science,Health,Health Care,Biography Memoir
God's Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine