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

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

Sweet, Victoria

Paperback

$18.00 $13.50 Save 25%
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.

EAN: 9781594486548
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Publication Date: 2013-04-02
Pages: 432
Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.4 x 1.0 inches
BISAC Subjects: Medical (Incl. Patients), Essays,
Health Policy

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