God's Hotel by Victoria Sweet
Victoria Sweet . Unknown Year . English
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 Hôtel-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.
Categories: Health & Wellness
About the Author
Dr. Sweet, Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, is also a prize-winning (Guggenheim Fellowship) historian with a PhD in medical history. As a fourth-generation Californian whose family arrived with the Gold Rush, Dr. Sweet describes her education as divided between science and the humanities. While at Stanford she majored in mathematics and minored in the classics. After starting a PhD in psychology at Harvard, she realized medicine would work better for her and went on to receive her medical degree from UC Irvine. Eventually she decided to go back to school and get a PhD in medical history and also began practice at Laguna Honda Hospital in San Francisco, the last of the old-fashioned almshouses. There she had the opportunity to practice a nearly-vanished kind of medicine. Gradually the hospital transformed the way she understood her work. Alongside the modern view of the body as a machine to be fixed, her extraordinary patients taught her an older idea, that of the body as a garden to be tended. As she grew up in Medicine, she found herself changed by her patients and she started thinking and writing early on about everything that came up: The concept of medicine as a calling and a vocation; the archetype of a physician; the split between curing and caring. Because to be a good doctor, she decided, you have to be a scientific humanist and a humanistic scientist. Her best-selling memoirs—God's Hotel and Slow Medicine—opened many doors around the world. Doors to hospitals and medical schools, nursing schools and universities, associations, boardrooms, and courtrooms, and she began to get a better idea of what was going on in healthcare, really, behind the scenes. Out of these experiences has come her third book, Convictions: A Story of Medicine in the 21st Century.
