Victoria Sweet Boeken

Rooted in the Earth, Rooted in the Sky is a detailed study of the medicine of Hildegard of Bingen, a medieval mystic, theologian and composer, who also wrote a practical medical text. Although there has been an explosion of interest in Hildegard's music, theology, illuminations and medicine in the last two decades, this is the first book to use her remarkable text to revise not only our conception of Hildegard but also of premodern medicine itself. It does so by contextualizing her work with primary and secondary historical sources, unedited manuscripts, anthropological and archeological evidence and linguistic analyses. Its surprising conclusion is that the premodern body was more like a plant than a machine or a computer program, and the physician more like a gardener than a mechanic or a computer programmer.

The book, first published in 2006, is a scholarly work by Routledge, an imprint of Taylor & Francis. It offers a comprehensive exploration of its subject matter, providing valuable insights and analysis. The text is aimed at readers seeking a deeper understanding of the topics discussed, making it a significant contribution to its field.

Victoria Sweet's new book, SLOW MEDICINE, is on sale now! For readers of Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air, a medical “page-turner” that traces one doctor’s “remarkable journey to the essence of medicine” (The San Francisco Chronicle). 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.

"Wonderful... Physicans would do well to learn this most important lesson about caring for patients." —The New York Times Book Review Over the years that Victoria Sweet has been a physician, “healthcare” has replaced medicine, “providers” look at their laptops more than at their patients, and costs keep soaring, all in the ruthless pursuit of efficiency. Yet the remedy that economists and policy makers continue to miss is also miraculously simple. Good medicine takes more than amazing technology; it takes time—time to respond to bodies as well as data, time to arrive at the right diagnosis and the right treatment. Sweet knows this because she has learned and lived it over the course of her remarkable career. Here she relates unforgettable stories of the teachers, doctors, nurses, and patients through whom she discovered the practice of Slow Medicine, in which she has been both pioneer and inspiration. Medicine, she helps us to see, is a craft and an art as well as a science. It is relational, personal, even spiritual. To do it well requires a hard-won wisdom that no algorithm can replace—that brings together “fast” and “slow” in a truly effective, efficient, sustainable, and humane way of healing.

Die Ärztin Victoria Sweet beschreibt ihre persönliche Entdeckung einer neuen Medizin, die auf unvergesslichen Erfahrungen mit Patienten und Kollegen basiert. Sie stellt das Konzept der Slow Medicine vor, das schnelle und langsame Ansätze der Medizin vereint und einen effektiven, nachhaltigen und menschlichen Heilungsweg bietet. Nach vielen Jahren in der klinischen Praxis erkennt sie, dass die gängige medizinische Auffassung, die den Körper als Maschine betrachtet, nicht ihren Überzeugungen entspricht. Diese Sichtweise behandelt Krankheiten als mechanische Schäden, die behoben werden müssen, während sie der Medizin der Vormoderne näher steht, die den Körper als Pflanze sieht. In diesem Ansatz wird der Arzt als Gärtner betrachtet, der den Patienten im Kontext seiner Umgebung unterstützt. Sweet erkennt, dass der Heilungsprozess eine dynamische Wechselwirkung zwischen Patient und Arzt darstellt. Ihre Erkenntnisse werden durch die Prinzipien der Slow Food-Bewegung inspiriert, die ähnliche Werte verkörpern. In ihrem zweiten Buch nach „God’s Hotel“ plädiert sie leidenschaftlich für eine patientenorientierte Medizin und liefert ein mitreißendes Memoire voller Geschichten und Fakten. Giovanni Maio, Professor für Medizinethik, hebt hervor, dass Sweet ein wichtiges Thema anspricht: den Zeitdruck in der modernen Medizin, der sowohl Patienten als auch Heilberufe negativ beeinflusst.