News
August 2011
Laguna Honda Hospital
God's Hotel: A
Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage
to the Heart of Medicine
by Patrick Monette-Shaw
Riverhead Books a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc. lists in its Riverhead, Winter 2012 catalog for booksellers, a new book of essays by former Laguna Honda Hospital physician Victoria Sweet, MD, PhD.
Sweets new book, Gods Hotel: A Doctor,
a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine,
will be published in April 2012. The publishers review
of the book on pages 23 and 24 of Riverheads catalog reads,
in part:
A sample essay from the book, The Patients at Gods Hotel, is on page 37 of the catalog.
Sweet was a physician at Laguna Honda for twenty years, and is an associate clinical professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Beyond physician and educator, she served on Laguna Hondas Bioethics Committee for a number of years, considered by many to be one of the hospitals most widely-respected physicians.
An excellent and moving essay by Dr. Sweet regarding Laguna Honda Hospitals hospice¹, Code Pearl, is available on-line. Code Pearl was published in Health Affairs, a monthly publication by Project HOPE, the People-to-People Health Foundation, in its JanuaryFebruary 2008 issue.
The imagery Sweet evokes is breathtaking, illuminating rapport with both the patients of, and her co-workers at, Laguna Honda. As only a physician specializing in internal medicine who also holds a PhD in history and social medicine might, Sweets essays reveal true selves, ours meeting hers.
Along the way, she imparts insights in ethics.
As book reviews of Gods Hotel, interviews with its author, or a schedule of book launch local events become available in the Spring, stopLHHdownsize.com will be updated with additional information and links.
Gods Hotel can be pre-ordered now from Amazon.com for release-date delivery.
Patrick Monette-Shaw is an open government accountability advocate,
a patient advocate and a member of Californias First Amendment
Coalition.
¹ Laguna Hondas hospice
was an award-winning program built and nurtured by Dr. Derek Kerr,
another former Laguna Honda physician for over 20 years, before
he was wrongfully terminated for blowing the whistle on abuse
of Laguna Honda Hospitals patient gift fund and other financial
improprieties within San Franciscos Department of Public
Health.
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