God's Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine

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.



Laguna Honda, lower-tech but human-paced, gave Sweet the opportunity to practice a kind of...