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

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€"€œanyone 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 €œhealth care facility,€ revealed its own surprising truths about the essence, cost, and value of caring for the body and the soul.