Title: God's hotel
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"--
Subjects: Physicians, Hospital care, Laguna Honda Hospital (San Francisco, Calif.), MEDICAL / Essays, Anecdotes, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Medical, Biography, History, Laguna Honda Hospital, Autobiography, San Francisco, Hospitals, Physicians, biography, San francisco (calif.), biography, Ambulatory Care Facilities, Personal Narratives
Places: United States, San Francisco, California
People: Victoria Sweet