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A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine
Riverhead
May 2012
On Sale: April 26, 2012
372 pages
ISBN: 1594488436
EAN: 9781594488436
Kindle: B005GSZHYU
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Memoir
San Francisco's Laguna Honda Hospital is the last almshouse in the country, a descendant of the HΓ΄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, 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.
 Media BuzzTell Me More - October 11, 2012
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