God's Hotel

<b><b>Victoria Sweet's new book SLOW MEDICINE is on sale now!</b> <p/>For readers of Paul Kalanithi's <i>When Breath Becomes Air </i>a medical page-turner that traces one doctor's remarkable journey to the essence of medicine (<i>The San Francisco Chronicle</i>). <br></b><p>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.<br> 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. <i>God's Hotel </i>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.</p>