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

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