God's Hotel - A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine (Paperback)

A medical "page-turner" that traces one doctor's "remarkable journey to the essence of medicine" (The San Francisco Chronicle). San Francisco's Laguna Honda Hospital is the last almshouse in the country, a descendant of the H 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, 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. 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 the body and the soul.

General

Imprint:	Riverhead Books,U.S.
Country of origin:	United States
Release date:	April 2013
First published:	April 2013
Authors:	Victoria Sweet
Dimensions:	208 x 140 x 24mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback - Trade
Pages:	416
ISBN-13:	978-1-59448-654-8
Categories:	Books > Language & Literature > Biography & autobiography > Science, technology & engineering Books > Medicine > General issues > General Books > Biography > Science, technology & engineering
LSN:	1-59448-654-9
Barcode:	9781594486548

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