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

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Look out for Victoria Sweet's new book, SLOW MEDICINE, coming October 2017 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 Hotel-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.