Booksmith Presents
Victoria Sweet - GOD’S HOTEL: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine
A Launch Party!
- When
- Fri Apr 27, 2012
- Where
- The Booksmith
- Time
- 7:30 pm
- Tags
- Literary Arts, Author Appearances
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Description
Twenty years ago, a brilliant doctor took what she thought was a short-term assignment at an old-fashioned charity hospital. Today, she is still there. What she found at Laguna Honda Hospital in San Francisco captivated and astonished her – not just the remarkable cases that doctors rarely see anymore, but the opportunity to practice a time-honored form of “slow medicine” that was attentive to the soul as well as the body, that often brought about stunning cures, and that offered abundant lessons for the efficiency-obsessed model of medicine that now dominates our healthcare system. Revealing her dazzling literary gifts as much as her incisive medical insights, Victoria Sweet tells the dramatic and moving stories of her patients, her hospital, and her own journey as a physician in her first book, GOD’S HOTEL.Sweet knew instantly that Laguna Honda – with its open wards, gardens, greenhouse, aviary, and barnyard – was very different from your typical modern hospital, and she quickly fell under its spell. It lacked the high-tech equipment of a state-of-the-art facility, but it also lacked the grinding emphasis on speed, bureaucratic protocol, and cost cutting. The patients had weirder and more extreme illnesses than any Sweet had ever encountered, but she got to work with them in ways that doctors hardly ever do anymore – over long periods of time that allowed her to observe them carefully, listen to their stories, and treat them as whole human beings.
Her patients included Mrs. Muller, for whom a simple x-ray reversed months of suffering and disability due to a series of inappropriate diagnoses and costly treatments. Mr. Grenz’s protruding tongue and an almost-forgotten vital sign called the “paradoxical pulse” were the clues Sweet needed to save him from heart failure. Mr. Bramwell suffered from severe dementia, but his undiminished ability to dance testified to the almost miraculous persistence of his spirit.
As Sweet learned, Laguna Honda’s values were inspired by the Hôtels-Dieu, or God’s Hotels, of medieval Europe. Founded by nuns and monks, these were the first Western institutions to care for the sick. Long interested in the fascinating history of pre-modern medicine, Sweet made a pilgrimage to Switzerland and wrote her Ph.D. thesis about the most prominent medieval healer, a nun called Hildegard of Bingen. Hildegard saw the doctor more as a gardener than a mechanic, and her keenly perceptive observations of the body’s natural healing processes are still instructive today.
As Sweet chronicles, however, this unusual hospital – perhaps the last of its kind in the United States – could not remain forever beyond the reach of the bureaucrats, the politicians, and the efficiency experts. In recent years, they descended on Laguna Honda, determined to transform it into a modern health care facility, and the hospital has been completely rebuilt. But it remains an open question whether the spirit of the old institution can be transplanted into the new one. In a very real sense, the hospital is the ultimate hero of Sweet’s narrative, with a story as engaging, revelatory, and sometimes heartbreaking as those of the patients and staff.
Sweet beguiles us with tales so gripping and a voice so intimate that we barely notice that lessons are being imparted. Yet as she recounts dozens of case histories and explains how her patients at Laguna Honda have profoundly changed the way she practices medicine, she suggests steps to make healthcare not only more humane for both patients and medical professionals, but often vastly less expensive. In addition, she offers trenchant and thought-provoking commentary on the healthcare reform bill passed by Congress and signed into law by President Obama in 2010, as well as other reform efforts.
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