God's Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine
Quantity | Price | Discount |
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List Price | $18.00 | |
1 - 24 | $15.30 | 15% |
25 - 99 | $11.16 | 38% |
100 - 249 | $10.80 | 40% |
250 - 499 | $10.44 | 42% |
500 + | $10.26 | 43% |
$18.00
Book Information
Publisher: | Riverhead Books |
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Publish Date: | 04/02/2013 |
Pages: | 432 |
ISBN-13: | 9781594486548 |
ISBN-10: | 1594486549 |
Language: | English |
Full Description
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, 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 "health care facility," revealed its own surprising truths about the essence, cost, and value of caring for the body and the soul.