Dr. Sweet is an Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. She is also a prize-winning historian with a Ph.D. in history and social medicine.

She has practiced medicine for more than twenty years at Laguna Honda Hospital in San Francisco, which is where she began writing. Two of her essays were published in Health Affairs: The Policy Journal of the Health Sphere --- ”Thy Will be Done” and “Code Pearl.” Other published work include her book on Hildegard of Bingen: ROOTED IN THE EARTH, ROOTED IN THE SKY: Hildegard of Bingen and Premodern Medicine (Routledge, 2006) and “Hildegard of Bingen and the Greening of Medieval Medicine” in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine (1999).Her writing has received numerous honors, including the Shryock Medal, the Estes Award, and the Stannard Memorial Award.

Books by Victoria Sweet

God's Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine

by Victoria Sweet - Medicine, Nonfiction

San Francisco's Laguna Honda Hospital gave Victoria 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.