lesbian spiritual book group Saturday, July 12, 2014 meeting

Each of our meetings brings together some members who have been with us from the beginning and some new fellow travelers. Once again we will meet in Willow's beautifully artistic home, and the setting and the conversation will be intimate. There is such richness in the discussions we have with each other, this group of deeply thinking, intelligent and articulate lesbians. Each time we meet, we become a more intimate group of fellow readers and friends. We miss those of you who could not join us and hope you will come again, or for the first time.

Our next meeting will be on Saturday, July 12, from 4:00-6:00 pm at Andrea's house--I have air conditioning! We will read God's Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the
Heart of Medicine by Victoria Sweet, M.D. (who has been partnered with a woman for many years.) We would love to have you join us! You are welcome whether you have read the book or not--the conversation will be rich regardless. Each time we are joined by some who have not read the book, and I think they can attest that the conversations start with the book and roam freely into the rest of our lives.

Please remember to change your RSVP if your plans change. I'd rather not limit the size of the meetup and it's helpful to know how many chairs we really need. Meeting space and beverages will be provided. As a way of increasing community among us, please bring some small edible thing to share, but empty hands are fine, too.

From the publisher and reviewers:

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, 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.

“Transcendent… readable chapters go down like restorative sips of cool water,
and its hard-core subversion cheers like a shot of gin… God’s Hotel [is]
a tour de force… 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

“Engaging… You might not expect a book about San Francisco's most downtrodden patients to be a page-turner, but it is. With its colorful cast of characters battling the tide of history, God's Hotel is a remarkable journey into the essence of medicine.”
–San Francisco Chronicle

"Victoria Sweet writes beautifully about the enormous richness of life at Laguna Honda, the chronic [care] hospital where she has spent the last twenty years, and the intense sense of place and community that binds patients and staff there. Such community in the medical world is vanishingly rare now, and Laguna Honda may be the last of its kind… God's Hotel is a most important book which raises fundamental questions about the nature of medicine in our time. It should be required reading for anyone interested in the 'business' of healthcare – and especially those interested in the humanity of healthcare." –Oliver Sacks, M.D. author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and The Mind's Eye

“A beautifully written and illuminating book… [Sweet’s] metaphors are poetic and hint at the mystical, but then she pulls back with the educated eye of a
scientist… For both the agnostic and the believer, Sweet pinpoints the element
of medicine that makes it a calling rather than a job: the unique and sustaining
love that is sparked between a doctor and patient.” –Jerome Groopman, The New York Review of Books

"Remarkable… [Sweet] would appreciate that it took time for me to journey to and through her work since that may be one of the many compelling messages she so eloquently, yet simply by storytelling, conveys… permitting ‘tincture of time’ to also do its job." –The Huffington Post

"Sweet's warm, anecdotal style shines… The author's compelling argument for Laguna Honda's philosophy of 'slow medicine' will make readers contemplate if perhaps the body should be viewed more as a garden to be tended rather than a machine to be fixed." –Kirkus (reviewed as a Best Book of 2012)

“Captivating… with this humane and thoughtful work, Sweet joins physician-authors such as Oliver Sacks, Jerome Groopman and Abraham Verghese.”
–The Dallas Morning News

“[A] watershed book ...Vital, exquisitely written, and spectacularly multidimensional, Sweet’s clinically exacting, psychologically discerning, practical, spiritual, and tenderly funny anecdotal chronicle steers the politicized debate over health care back to medicine and compassion. –Booklist (starred review)

“Visionary… thoroughly subversive in all the best ways… This book’s lessons and conclusions should challenge doctors, nurses, hospital administrators, and policy makers to stop and rethink their core beliefs.” –Journal of Health Affairs
“A remarkable, poignant portrait of a committed physician on a quest
to understand the heart, as well as the art, of medicine… A marvelous, arresting
read.” –Library Journal (starred review)

“[Our] healthcare system might function a lot better if every single American citizen, healthcare professional, politician and legislator would read Victoria Sweet’s insightful, beautifully written and moving book.” –Bookpage

About the Author

Victoria Sweet has been a physician at San Francisco’s Laguna Honda Hospital for more than twenty years. An associate clinical professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, she is also a prize-winning
historian with a Ph.D. in history and social medicine.

It seems that people want to know more about Dr. Sweet than she’d imagined, especially book groups. They want to know more about her family, her upbringing, and what made her go into history. She’s delighted to discover that her traces have been so well-covered, and she’s also delighted to add the following:

“In terms of my background. The main thing for me is that I’m a fourth generation Californian, and almost a fourth generation San Franciscan. My family came to California for the Gold Rush. Some of them went by ship and had to portage across the Isthmus of Panama; others went by covered wagon. So I grew up with many stories about San Francisco. I heard about Emperor Norton, about the 1906 Earthquake, about the failure to get a freeway through the heart of the city, and I grew up with a lot of feeling for the city of Saint Francis. That’s in part why I responded so thoroughly to Laguna Honda.

“I went to Stanford and majored in mathematics, minored in classics. I was always split between science and the humanities. Then I started a PhD program at Harvard in psychology, but realized that medicine would work better for me than basic research. Because to be a good doctor you have to be a scientific humanist and a humanistic scientist.

“As I grew up in medicine, I found myself changed by my patients and I started writing and thinking about everything that came up, early on. The concept of a medicine as a calling and a vocation; the archetype of a physician; the linguistic connection between wholeness, healing and salvation; the split between curing and caring. Finally, I decided to bite the bullet and dive into history. It’s a mixed metaphor but true. Especially after I discovered Hildegard and her medicine. And this is where God’s Hotel starts.”

See her TEDx talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4w17dEDYrhE

Her published work also includes a book on the twelfth century mystic and medical practitioner, Hildegard of Bingen: Rooted in the Earth, Rooted in the Sky: Hildegard of Bingen and Premodern Medicine (Routledge, 2006), and her essay, “Hildegard of Bingen and the Greening of Medieval Medicine,”(Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 1999).