Victoria Sweet is associate professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and a prize-winning (Guggenheim Fellowship) historian with a PhD in medical history.
As a fourth generation Californian whose family arrived with the Gold Rush, Dr. Sweet describes her education as divided between science and the humanities. While at Stanford she majored in mathematics and minored in the classics. After starting a PhD in psychology at Harvard, she realized medicine would work better for her and went on to receive her medical degree from UC Irvine.
Eventually she decided to go back to school and get a PhD in medical history with the medieval mystic and medical practitioner Hildegard of Bingen as her focus. She also began practice at Laguna Honda Hospital in San Francisco, the last of the old-fashioned almshouses.
There she had the opportunity to practice a nearly-vanished kind of medicine. Gradually the hospital transformed the way she understood her work. Alongside the modern view of the body as a machine to be fixed, her extraordinary patients taught her an older idea, that of the body as a garden to be tended.
As she grew up in medicine, she found herself changed by her patients and she started thinking and writing early on about everything that came up: the concept of medicine as a calling and a vocation, the archetype of a physician the split between curing and caring. Because to be good doctor, she decided, you have to be a scientific humanist and a humanist scientist.
God's Hotel and Slow Medicine comprise her remarkable journey to the essence of Medicine. Her newest work, just finished, is a novel based on true events—Convictions: A story of what is really going on in healthcare today, behind the scenes.