classics

Helping those in need

Visit Site

MP3 Audio Sample

rating
 
 
goodreads logo

Short Synopsis
In this beautifully written work, Victoria Sweet shares with listeners her experience practicing medicine in San Francisco's Laguna Honda Hospital, and raises important questions about healthcare today.

Full Synopsis
San Francisco's Laguna Honda Hospital is the last almshouse in the country, a descendant of the hôtel-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.

"[Sweet's] caring is always evident as she narrates her own book, and her reading is gripping." ---AudioFile
Shortlisted for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction

God's Hotel

A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine

Author Victoria Sweet

Narrated by Victoria Sweet

Publication date Apr 29, 2013

Running time 14 hrs

Available Formats

Suggestions?
Let us know!