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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.… (more)
Media reviews
Sweet’s tone, in “God’s Hotel,” nicely matches her subject. Her writing has a lovely, antique quality. For example, she almost never refers to Laguna Honda’s exact location. Instead, she calls San Francisco “The City,” as opposed to “The County” — the acute care hospital from which so many Laguna Honda residents arrive. The vagueness of location also conveys a distance in time, as if Sweet were writing from both far away and long ago. She reinforces this impression by launching into anecdotes with the word “now,” as in “Now Mr. Conley was a nice man…,” as if we readers were fellow pilgrims, resting by the side of the road, listening to Sweet tell her story.
Sweet would likely be pleased to have left this impression, because she comes to consider all of life, including medicine, as a kind of pilgrimage. After one of her treks in Europe, she returns to Laguna Honda with a pilgrim’s eye for allegory, seeing those around her as “characters…patients, nurses, delivery men, doctors — with spiritual and moral messages, if I chose to decipher them.” Sweet invites us to view the modernization of Laguna Honda as an allegory, a cautionary tale about what is lost when healers and their patients are replaced by bureaucrats and “clients.”