God's hotel : a doctor, a hospital, and a pilgrimage to the heart of medicine / Victoria Sweet
Publisher: New York : Riverhead Books, 2013Edition: First Riverhead trade paperback editionDescription: x, 416 pages : illustrations ; 21 cmContent type:- text
- unmediated
- volume
- 9781594486548
- 1594486549
- R 154 .S943 2012
Item type | Current library | Call number | Status | Date due | Barcode | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Books Overnight | Far Eastern University - Nicanor Reyes Medical Foundation Circulation Section | R 154 .S943 2012 (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | Available | 0008112 |
Includes bibliographic references (pages [391]-416)
"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"--Provided by publisher
"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"--Provided by publisher
Education
Department of Medicine
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