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

Written by:
Victoria Sweet
Narrated by:
Victoria Sweet

Unabridged Audiobook

Ratings
Book
8
Narrator
3
Release Date
April 2013
Duration
13 hours 46 minutes
Summary
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.
1 book added to cart
Subtotal
$21.99
View Cart