THE WARM-HEARTED, HUMOROUS STORY OF A COURAGEOUS YOUNG DOCTOR IN NOVA SCOTIA “I am no Grenfell,” said young intern Brasset to Canada’s famous Dr. John B. Thompson, but he agreed to go to Canso, Nova Scotia, as sole doctor for 2,000 people, remote from the world. So begins the story of a doctor’s pilgrimage that describes the early trials and travels of a warm, human and completely delightful general practitioner. Young Dr. Brasset wanted to become a brain surgeon, but lacked the money. In desolate Canso, relay station for the Atlantic cable, his first patient was a sick baby fed only on dry cod. He went in debt $3,600 in six months, his largest fee being the twenty-two dollars he collected from three drunken men by beating them up. Temporary work in a mining town proved little better, but resulted in marriage to the lovely Sally MacNeil. At rural Little Brook, where lived descendants of 900 Acadians returned from their historic flight, the first patient proved to be a 1400-pound gored ox; but fortunes improved and eventually there came the opportunity for brain surgery at the great hospital—but by now Dr. Brasset’s experience with people had changed his ambition. The tragic, the pitiful, the touching, the funny incidents of this warm-hearted tale reveal how, through the author’s great courage and humor, what could have been a very grim battle became in reality a very happy story.

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.

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This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.