Victoria Sweet, Slow Medicine

Bookshop Santa Cruz is pleased to present Victoria Sweet for a book talk and signing of her new book Slow Medicine: The Way to Healing. Known for God’s Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine, Sweet is back to unpack her vision for how healing works and delves into why we must rethink how our healthcare system treats patients. Like Slow Food and related movements, Slow Medicine—in which Sweet is regarded as a pioneer—prizes time and depth over rapid judgment and assumption. Slow Medicine encompasses craft as well as science, vocation as well as profession. It prioritizes patients, takes the contexts of their lives into account, and acknowledges that each body tells a unique story that cannot be captured in electronic charts but must be “read” firsthand.
Slow Medicine offers memorable, enlightening, and concerning stories of patients, nurses, doctors and teachers. Their experiences, and hers, reveal her path to understanding the healing vocation and at the same time underscore the takeover of the medical field by healthcare administrators, whose reign has undermined the care patients are given. Sweet’s deeply engaging stories powerfully illustrate her argument that we need both Fast and Slow Medicine to create truly effective, humane and sustainable healing.
Victoria Sweet was a physician at San Francisco’s Laguna Honda Hospital for more than twenty years, an experience she chronicled in God’s Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine. An associate clinical professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, she is also a prizewinning historian with a Ph.D. in history and social medicine, and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.

“Anybody considering medical school, or already toiling there, has to read this book. Everyone else should too… [Sweet’s] memoir of growing slowly into her calling is about learning not just to save lives but to make a life…Her personal odyssey is more stirring than any polemical manifesto could be.” —The Atlantic

“Through the moving stories of patients and her experiences in medical school, [Sweet] explores how she found a compassionate way to care. A thoughtful companion to one of today’s hot-button issues.” —Good Housekeeping

"[A] master storyteller…highly readable… the sick will take comfort in this physician's warm, personal, knowledgeable approach.” —Kirkus

“Profoundly intimate...Sweet provides a strong and necessary tonic as health care, in all its complexities, remains at the center of the national conversation.” —Booklist

“Sound advice that all involved in health care should heed. [Slow Medicine] will appeal to both professional and lay readers.” —Library Journal