God's hotel
Subtitle: a doctor, a hospital, and a pilgrimage to the heart of medicine
By: Victoria Sweet
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Published: 2012
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 372
ISBN-13: 9781594488436
Subjects: Physicians; Hospital care; Laguna Honda Hospital (San Francisco, Calif.); MEDICAL / Essays; Anecdotes; BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Medical; Biography; History
Description: "San Francisco's Laguna Honda Hospital is the last almshouse in the  country, a descendant of the Hotel-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"--

"Choosing service in the last remaining almshouse in America, and tracing our understanding of medicine back to its medieval roots, a physician uncovers lost lessons in the care of body and soul"--
Table of contents: title: First years; title: The love of her life; title: The visit of Dee and Tee, health-care efficiency experts; title: The miraculous healing of Terry Becker; title: Slow medicine; title: Dr. Diet, Dr. Quiet, and Dr. Merryman; title: Dancing to the tune of Glen Miller; title: Wedding at Cana; title: How I  fell in love; title: It's a wonderful country; title: Recalled to life; title: The spirit of God's hotel.