The Brown Book Club will meet on Sunday, October 14 to discuss God’s Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine by Victoria Sweet (nonfiction, 432 pp, 2013). We’ll begin at 6PM with dinner, then go on to discussion. Please RSVP by Friday, October 12 by contacting the event organizer, who will provide location information. Mention any food allergies, and bring $6 – $8 for the meal.
“San Francisco’s Laguna Honda Hospital is the last almshouse in the country, a descendant of the Hôtel-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.” – Amazon.com
“Others have written about the relationship between time and medical care with similar eloquence and urgency, but the centuries of perspective that Dr. Sweet brings infuse the point with unforgettable clarity.” –The New York Times
“A radical and inspiring alternative vision of caring for the sick.” –Vanity Fair