Victoria Sweet was a physician at San Francisco's Laguna Honda Hospital for more than twenty years, an experience she chronicled in God's Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine. An associate clinical professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, she is also a prizewinning historian with a Ph.D. in history and social medicine, and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.
"Wonderful...often lyrical...subtle and insightful...Physicians
would do well to learn this most important lesson about caring for
patients from Sweet's book: 'Establishing the correct diagnoses and
then getting them off all those unnecessary medications, with their
side effects and adverse reactions, took a lot of time, but in the
long run it saved way more money than it cost. It was slower but it
was better.'" --The New York Times Book Review "Anybody considering
medical school, or already toiling there, has to read this book.
Everyone else should too... [Sweet's] memoir of growing slowly into
her calling is about learning not just to save lives but to make a
life...Her personal odyssey is more stirring than any polemical
manifesto could be." --The Atlantic "Through the moving stories of
patients and her experiences in medical school, [Sweet] explores
how she found a compassionate way to care. A thoughtful companion
to one of today's hot-button issues." --Good Housekeeping
"An impassioned plea for a more humane system of healing -- and a
great read for everyone involved in medicine as patient or
practitioner." -San Francisco Chronicle "Dr. Sweet writes as if she
was sitting at our kitchen table, quietly and compassionately
teaching about our bodies and our lives." -New York Journal of
Books "[Sweet] offers an alternative to the tyranny of efficiency
at the expense of healing." -Good Times (Santa Cruz)
"Beautiful...[Sweet's] prose is clear and direct, with a warmth and
intelligence that engages the reader from the book's first pages, a
harrowing description of her father's near-fatal hospital
admission... A sober and lucid examination of what we lose when
medicine is shaped by economics and not vocation, when it is
informed by litigation and not reverence. One can only hope, and
pray, that Sweet is not a prophet crying in the wilderness." -St.
Cloud Visitor "[A] master storyteller...highly readable... the sick
will take comfort in this physician's warm, personal, knowledgeable
approach." --Kirkus Reviews "Profoundly intimate...Sweet provides a
strong and necessary tonic as health care, in all its complexities,
remains at the center of the national conversation." --Booklist
"Sound advice that all involved in health care should heed. [Slow
Medicine] will appeal to both professional and lay readers."
--Library Journal
Praise for God's Hotel "Transcendent . . . readable chapters go
down like restorative sips of cool water, and its hard-core
subversion cheers like a shot of gin . . . God's Hotel [is] a tour
de force." --The New York Times "A most important book that raises
fundamental questions about the nature of medicine in our time. It
should be required reading for anyone interested in the 'business'
of healthcare--and especially those interested in the humanity of
healthcare." --Oliver Sacks, M.D., author of The Man Who Mistook
His Wife for a Hat and The Mind's Eye
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