Release Date:- 2012-04-26
Reviews Counts:- 89
User Average Rating:- 4
Availability:- In Stock
Kind:- ebook
Victoria Sweet's new book, SLOW MEDICINE, is on sale now!
For readers of Paul Kalanithiās When Breath Becomes Air, a medical āpage-turnerā that traces one doctorās āremarkable journey to the essence of medicineā (The San Francisco Chronicle).
San Franciscoās Laguna Honda Hospital is the last almshouse in the country, a descendant of the HĆ“tel-Dieu (Godās hotel) that cared for the sick in the Middle Ages. Ballet dancers and rock musicians, professors and thievesāāanyone who had fallen, or, often, leapt, onto hard timesā and needed extended medical careāended 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. Godās 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 āhealth care facility,ā revealed its own surprising truths about the essence, cost, and value of caring for the body and the soul.