Description: 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.
Brief description: Victoria Sweet is an associate clinical professor of medicine at University of California, San Francisco. A prizewinning historian, Victoria holds a Ph.D. in history and social medicine. She is also the author of Rooted in the Earth, Rooted in the Sky: Hildegard of Bingen and Premodern Medicine.
Review Quotes:
"A radical and inspiring alternative vision of caring for the sick."
-- "Vanity Fair"