"On Not Making Space for the Sacred in Medicine"
Victoria Sweet, MD
Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine, University of California, San Franciso
In this talk Dr. Sweet will discuss her experience of the unmaking of sacred space in medicine. She initially chose her career in medicine as a path on which the sacred is ipso facto included as birth, death and suffering, and then watched as it, renamed "healthcare" discarded the burdens of the sacred, --thoughtfulness, consideration, connection-- in the interest of efficiency. Eventually she rediscovered the sacred in the medicine of Hildegard of Bingen and the work of Carl Jung, all while practicing in an atavistic hospital she calls GH---God's Hotel. And then she watched as GH itself morphed in the same way, from medicine to healthcare, from monastery to factory. Burnout is the inevitable result of this transformation because sacred space is as necessary for the doctor and nurse as it is for the patient.
Victoria Sweet is an Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and a prize-winning historian with a Ph.D. in medical history. She practiced medicine for over twenty years at Laguna Honda Hospital in San Francisco. Her acclaimed book, God's Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine (Riverhead, 2012), lays out her evidence—in stories of her patients and her hospital—for some new ideas about medicine and healthcare, to counter the emphasis on “efficiency” in control of health care costs. As a Guggenheim Fellow, she wrote her second book, Slow Medicine: The Way to Healing. Among other honors, Dr. Sweet was the recipient of the JP McGovern Award for Humanism in Medicine from Yale University in 2018.
Victoria Sweet is an Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and a prize-winning historian with a Ph.D. in medical history. She practiced medicine for over twenty years at Laguna Honda Hospital in San Francisco. Her acclaimed book, God's Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine (Riverhead, 2012), lays out her evidence—in stories of her patients and her hospital—for some new ideas about medicine and healthcare, to counter the emphasis on “efficiency” in control of health care costs. As a Guggenheim Fellow, she wrote her second book, Slow Medicine: The Way to Healing. Among other honors, Dr. Sweet was the recipient of the JP McGovern Award for Humanism in Medicine from Yale University in 2018.