About Victoria Sweet

Victoria Sweet is Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of California in San Francisco and a prize-winning historian with a Ph.D. in history and social medicine. For more than twenty years, she worked in San Francisco’s Laguna Honda Hospital, a rehabilitation center providing skilled nursing and therapeutic services to under-served populations. At Laguna Honda, she learned that health care works best when it is personal, face-to-face, and attentive to both the body and the soul, a practice she has dubbed “slow medicine.” Her first book, God’s Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine, traces her evolving understanding of the body as “a machine to be fixed” to an older, pre-modern understanding of the body as “a garden to be tended.” Her second book, Slow Medicine: The Way to Healing, explores her insights into medicine as both an art and a science that is relational, personal, even spiritual.