My wife is an avid reader, more so than me. She also has very good taste in her reading material. It's almost uncanny. So when she recommends a book or an author, I usually try to read it/them.
Yesterday a book came in the mail that she ordered. God's Hotel, by Victoria Sweet who is in addition to an author, a real doctor. Obviously I haven't read it, yet but it seems very interesting.
From the inside flap, More than 20 years ago, Dr. Victoria Sweet arrived at San Francisco's Laguna Honda Hospital, intending to stay for a brief time. A descendant of the Hotel-Dieu (God's Hotel) that cared for the sick poor in the Middle Ages.Laguna Honda was the last alms house in the country. ...
At Laguna Honda lower-tech but human-paced, Sweet had the opportunity to practice a kind of "slow medicine" that has almost vanished, and falling under the hospital's spell, she decided to stay. Gradually, her remarkable patients transformed the way she understood medicine. Alongside the modern view of the body as a machine to be repaired, they evoked an older idea, of the body as a garden to be tended. God's Hotel is 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 the body and soul.
Needless to say, she has first crack at it, but I intend to read it as soon as she's finished. I've already sneaked in a few pages in the first chapter, and she's made comments to me as she reads it. I think it will be an interesting read. I'm giving it a premature endorsement.
