God's Hotel by Victoria Sweet

This is a lay person’s edition of the PhD papers of Dr. Victoria Sweet’s research on Hildegard von Bingen;[1] and a lengthy report on the comings and goings at Laguna Honda Hospital in San Francisco.

It’s a story that could only take place in San Francisco: my old San Francisco.  My real affinity for San Francisco was the double-decade from about 1964-1983, when I felt I was in touch with the soul of the City.  For a big City, San Francisco is a small town.  I thought I knew everybody who was anybody in those days: but what did I know? 

I’d never heard of Laguna Honda.  It was right over the hill when I ran “Fiddler’s Green Chess Salon” in Noe Valley: who knew?  It was just down the way through the tunnel when Iiving at the “end” of Market Street: who knew?  My friend Lois used to tell me of her trip along this route picking up/delivering bags of money for the local mafia; gave her nightmares of bloody heads in the trunk.

Laguna Honda appears to have been a lightning rod; a divisive issue for those in the medical field over the past few decades in San Francisco.  The author comes under mighty criticism on the gossipy details of her career there.  But the value, and it is huge, of her writing this book is in her personal development and recounting of a postmodern view of her philosophical and medical education.

Her developing awareness of Hildegard von Bingen’s medical practice and philosophy; and Victoria’s exposure to a Spanish pilgrimage were, alone, worth the reading of this book.

 

 

 

 

I can not speak with any authority on the topic of homeopathic medicine; other than I spent three years, post melanoma cancer op, under the “control” of a homeopathic Clinic in Mill Valley led by Dr. Michael Gerber.

 

It worked. 

The passion for pilgrimage is a bucket list envy of mine.  I first heard about the Spanish pilgrimage 30 years ago from my English step-daughter’s birth dad, who was a political editor on the British Daily Telegraph.  He did it and raved about the experience.  My German wife went coast-to-coast across Britain’s Hadrian’s Wall on a classic English pilgrimage, leaving me in further awe.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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[1] Saint Hildegard of Bingen, was a German writer, composer, philosopher, elected a magistra by her fellow nuns in 1136, she founded the monasteries of Rupertsberg in 1150 and Eibingen in 1165. One of her works as a composer, the Ordo Virtutum, is an early example of liturgical drama and the oldest surviving morality play.

She wrote theological, botanical and medicinal texts, as well as letters, liturgical songs, and poems, while supervising miniature illuminations in the Rupertsberg manuscript of her first work, Scivias.  The history of her recognition as a saint is complicated, she has been recognized as a Doctor of the Church.