You will wish that Victoria Sweet were your doctor after reading . She worked at San Francisco's Laguna Honda Hospital - a former almshouse that took in the sickest and poorest - for 20 years, during which time she also conducted PhD research into the work of 12th-century German nun Hildegard of Bingen, a mystic and composer who practised medieval medicine. Sweet explored the idea of doctors being "gardeners" tending plants, as opposed to mechanics fixing machines. Time was key to the healing process, something that seems to have been forgotten by modern medicine. Sweet, whose narration is compelling, offers case histories: for example, street sleeper Terry Becker, who, apart from everything else, developed a bedsore so enormous her spine was visible through a hole of decayed tissue. Sweet did what Hildegard would have done, and two and a half years later, Becker was discharged. "We were in no hurry, and neither was she," Sweet writes. But by 2010 the hospital had become a short-term centre, bringing an end to Sweet's dose of "slow medicine".
