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

About this book

For readers of Paul Kalanithis When Breath Becomes Air a medical page-turner that traces one doctors remarkable journey to the essence of medicine (The San Francisco Chronicle). San Franciscos Laguna Honda Hospital is the last almshouse in the country a descendant of the Htel-Dieu (Gods hotel) that cared for the sick in the Middle Ages. Ballet dancers and rock musicians professors and thievesanyone who had fallen or often leapt onto hard times and needed extended medical careended 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. Gods 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.