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

To its staff, San Francisco’s Laguna Honda Hospital was a gift: a place with open wards that provided light, air, and a sense of community for its patients; where the emphasis was on “slow medicine” rather than high-speed computer time. Sweet, a physician at the hospital and a professor of medicine at UC-San Francisco, says Laguna Honda’s model was the medieval French hôtel-Dieu—God’s hotel—which cared for everyone who couldn’t care for themselves. But this unusual model led to problems in an age of cost-efficient medicine, and to complaints and a Department of Justice investigation . Sweet chronicles the internal politics and struggles behind the remarkable turnaround of this unusual hospital—one where she was “able to practice medicine... the way I wanted.” But if Laguna Honda felt like a gift to Sweet, the true gift was the courage of her patients, like the addled Mr. Bramwell, who demonstrated through a sweet and skillful dance with his nurses that even in such a patient, the soul, what the ancients called the “anima,” remains. Sweet’s tales of her hospital, patients, colleagues, and herself offer a fresh linking of medicine past and present. (Apr.)