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God's hotel : a doctor, a hospital, and a pilgrimage to the heart of medicine / Victoria Sweet.
Van Pelt Library R154.S925 A3 2012
By Request
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Sweet, Victoria.
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- Sweet, Victoria.
- Laguna Honda Hospital.
- Physicians--United States--Biography.
- Physicians.
- Hospital care.
- History.
- United States.
- California--San Francisco.
- Laguna Honda Hospital--History.
- Hospital care--California--San Francisco--Anecdotes.
- San Francisco.
- Hospitals--history.
- Medical Subjects:
- Physicians.
- San Francisco.
- Hospitals--history.
- Genre:
- Biographies.
- Anecdotes.
- Autobiographies.
- Physical Description:
- 372 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
- Place of Publication:
- New York : Riverhead Books, 2012.
- 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"--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.
- Contents:
- First years
- The love of her life
- The visit of Dee and Tee, health-care efficiency experts
- The miraculous healing of Terry Becker
- Slow medicine
- Dr. Diet, Dr. Quiet, and Dr. Merryman
- Dancing to the tune of Glen Miller
- Wedding at Cana
- How I fell in love
- It's a wonderful country
- Recalled to life
- The spirit of God's hotel.
- Notes:
- Includes bibliographical references.
- ISBN:
- 9781594488436
- 1594488436
- OCLC:
- 741538561
- Online:
- Cover image
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