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Westminster Town Hall Forum: Dr. Victoria Sweet speaks about "Slow Medicine"

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Dr. Victoria Sweet is associate clinical professor of medicine at the University of California in San Francisco and a prize-winning historian with a Ph.D. in history and social medicine. For more than 20 years, she worked in San Francisco's Laguna Honda Hospital, a rehabilitation center providing skilled nursing and therapeutic services to under-served populations.

Victoria Sweet
Victoria Sweet is associate clinical professor of Medicine at the University of California in San Francisco and a prize-winning historian with a Ph.D. in history and social medicine.
Courtesy of 2020 Westminster Town Hall Forum

At Laguna Honda, she learned that health care works best when it is personal, face-to-face, and attentive to both the body and the soul, a practice she has dubbed “slow medicine.” Her first book, “God’s Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine,” traces her evolving understanding of the body as "a machine to be fixed" to an older, pre-modern understanding of the body as "a garden to be tended."

Her second book, “Slow Medicine: The Way to Healing,” explores her insights into medicine as both an art and a science that is relational, personal, even spiritual.

Dr. Victoria Sweet spoke with MPR’s Cathy Wurzer for the first program in the 2020 fall season of the Westminster Town Hall Forum, hosted “virtually” because of the Covid-19 pandemic. This fall’s forums can be viewed online at westminsterforum.org. The Westminster Presbyterian Church is in downtown Minneapolis.