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

For readers of Paul Kalanithis When Breath Becomes Air,a medical page-turner that traces one doctors remarkable journey to the essence of medicine (The San Francisco Chronicle).

San Franciscos Laguna Honda Hospital is the last almshouse in the country, a descendant of the Htel-Dieu (Gods hotel) that cared for the sick in the Middle Ages. Ballet dancers and rock musicians, professors and thievesanyone who had fallen, or, often, leapt, onto hard times and needed extended medical careended 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. Gods 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.