Welcome to Litsy!

For readers of Paul Kalanithi�s When Breath Becomes Air, a medical �page-turner� that traces one doctor�s �remarkable journey to the essence of medicine� (The San Francisco Chronicle). San Francisco�s Laguna Honda Hospital is the last almshouse in the country, a descendant of the H�tel-Dieu (God�s hotel) that cared for the sick in the Middle Ages. Ballet dancers and rock musicians, professors and thieves��anyone who had fallen, or, often, leapt, onto hard times� and needed extended medical care�ended 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. God�s 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 �health care facility,� revealed its own surprising truths about the essence, cost, and value of caring for the body and the soul.