God's Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine Hardcover - 2012 - 1st Edition
by Sweet, Victoria
- Used
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, lower 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 body and soul.
AUTHOR BIO: Victoria Sweet has been a physician at San Francisco's Laguna Honda Hospital for more than twenty years. An associate clinical professor of medicine at University of California, San Francisco, she also holds a Ph.D. in history and social medicine. To learn more about Victoria Sweet and her work, please visit www.victoriasweet.com.Description
Standard delivery: 5 to 9 days
Details
- Title God's Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine
- Author Sweet, Victoria
- Binding Hardcover
- Edition number 1st
- Edition 1
- Condition Used - Good
- Pages 372
- Volumes 1
- Language ENG
- Publisher Riverhead Books, East Rutherford, NJ, U.S.A.
- Date 2012-04-26
- Illustrated Yes
- Bookseller's Inventory # A07L-00954
- ISBN 9781594488436 / 1594488436
- Weight 1.3 lbs (0.59 kg)
- Dimensions 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.6 in (23.11 x 15.75 x 4.06 cm)
- Ages 18 to UP years
- Grade levels 13 - UP
- Library of Congress subjects Physicians - United States, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Medical
- Library of Congress Catalog Number 2011049340
- Dewey Decimal Code B
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Summary
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, lower 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 body and soul.
