God's Hotel
Click to look inside
World of Books
The feel-good place to buy books
God's Hotel by Victoria Sweet
Victoria Sweet's new book, SLOW MEDICINE, is on sale now For readers of Paul Kalanithi's When Breath Becomes Air, 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.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781594488436 |
| ISBN 10 | 1594488436 |
| Title | God's Hotel |
| Author | Victoria Sweet |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Penguin Putnam Inc |
| Year published | 2012-04-26 |
| Number of pages | 372 |
| Prizes | Commended for Literary Award (Nonfiction) 2013 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |