 | This article reads like a press release or a news article and may be largely based on routine coverage .(October 2019) |
Victoria Sweet | |
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| Nationality | American |
| Known for | "Slow Medicine" medical doctor Historian of medicine |
Victoria Sweet is an American physician, author and advocate for what is termed "slow medicine". She is also a historian of medicine who has studied the writings of Hildegard of Bingen, a 12th century German abbess and medical therapist.
Victoria Sweet was born in Los Angeles, California. Her ancestors came to California from Germany in 1836. [1]
As an undergraduate she studied at Stanford University, [2] where she majored in mathematics, with a minor in the Classics. [3] She received her MD degree in 1977 at age 27 [4] from the University of California Irvine School of Medicine. [5] [6] She received an M.A. in 1995 and a Ph.D. in 2003, both degrees in History of Health Sciences, from the University of California, San Francisco. [7]
Sweet's doctorate study was based on the medical treatise of Hildegard of Bingen, written in Latin, entitled Causae et Curae ("Causes and Cures"). Sweet draws special attention to Hildegard's use of the word viriditas. It comes from the Latin word for "green," and was used to refer to the color of plants, as well as meaning "vigor" and "youthfulness." Sweet points out how Hildegard also used the word viriditas in the broader sense of the power of plants to put forth leaves and fruit, and the analogous intrinsic power of human beings to grow and to heal. [8] Inspired by Hildegard, Sweet began to ask herself as she was treating her patients whether anything was interfering with the viriditas or the intrinsic power to heal—to relate to healing like being a gardener who removes impediments and nourishes, in a sanctuary-like setting. [9]
During the 1990s and first decade of the 21st century, while obtaining her doctorate in medical history, Sweet was also working as an internal medicine physician at the old Laguna Honda Hospital in San Francisco. In the year 2010 a new hospital facility was built and repurposed. The old Laguna Honda Hospital was a long-term treatment and rehabilitation hospital. She describes the old hospital as being the last "almshouse" in America.
The conjunction of studying the healing philosophy of Hildegard of Bingen along with working at the old Laguna Honda Hospital helped Sweet formulate principles of what she refers to as "slow medicine". Sweet says that "sick people need time...and their doctors do too....Doctors need time to sit with their patients, to think, to read, to consult, to catch their mistakes." [10]
Over a four-year period, Sweet walked the 1,200 mile (1,900 km) Medieval pilgrimage-trail known as the "Way of St. James" (or in Spanish, the "Camino de Santiago"), from southern France to the north-west coast of Spain. For four different years, Sweet would return to walk a 400-mile (600 km) section of the trail, in order to complete the whole trail. [11] While hiking the pilgrimage trail, Sweet experienced a sense of connectedness and fellow-feeling, based on mutual assistance and reciprocal compassion, which she then brought to her evolving practice of medicine. [12]
Guggenheim Fellowship for 2014-2015 in the category of Creative Arts, General Non-fiction [13]
Hildegard of Bingen, also known as Saint Hildegard and the Sibyl of the Rhine, was a German Benedictine abbess and polymath active as a writer, composer, philosopher, mystic, visionary, and as a medical writer and practitioner during the High Middle Ages. She is one of the best-known composers of sacred monophony, as well as the most recorded in modern history. She has been considered by scholars to be the founder of scientific natural history in Germany.
The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) is a public land-grant research university in San Francisco, California. It is part of the University of California system and is dedicated entirely to health science and life science. It conducts research and teaching in medical and biological sciences.
Anne Lamott is an American novelist and non-fiction writer.
Medieval medicine in Western Europe was composed of a mixture of pseudoscientific ideas from antiquity. In the Early Middle Ages, following the fall of the Western Roman Empire, standard medical knowledge was based chiefly upon surviving Greek and Roman texts, preserved in monasteries and elsewhere. Medieval medicine is widely misunderstood, thought of as a uniform attitude composed of placing hopes in the church and God to heal all sicknesses, while sickness itself exists as a product of destiny, sin, and astral influences as physical causes. On the other hand, medieval medicine, especially in the second half of the medieval period, became a formal body of theoretical knowledge and was institutionalized in the universities. Medieval medicine attributed illnesses, and disease, not to sinful behaviour, but to natural causes, and sin was connected to illness only in a more general sense of the view that disease manifested in humanity as a result of its fallen state from God. Medieval medicine also recognized that illnesses spread from person to person, that certain lifestyles may cause ill health, and some people have a greater predisposition towards bad health than others.
Viriditas is a word meaning vitality, fecundity, lushness, verdure, or growth. It is particularly associated with abbess Hildegard von Bingen, who used it to refer to or symbolize spiritual and physical health, often as a reflection of the Divine Word or as an aspect of the divine nature.
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Mary Jane Rathbun, popularly known as Brownie Mary, was an American medical cannabis rights activist. As a hospital volunteer at San Francisco General Hospital, she became known for baking and distributing cannabis brownies to AIDS patients. Along with activist Dennis Peron, Rathbun lobbied for the legalization of cannabis for medical use, and she helped pass San Francisco Proposition P (1991) and California Proposition 215 (1996) to achieve those goals. She also contributed to the establishment of the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers Club, the first medical cannabis dispensary in the United States.
Ordo Virtutum is an allegorical morality play, or sacred music drama, by Hildegard of Bingen, composed c. 1151, during the construction and relocation of her Abbey at Rupertsberg. It is the earliest morality play by more than a century, and the only medieval musical drama to survive with an attribution for both text and music.
The Priscilla Chan and MarkZuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center (ZSFG) is a public hospital in San Francisco, California, under the purview of the city's Department of Public Health. It serves as the only Level I trauma center for the 1.5 million residents of San Francisco and northern San Mateo County. It is the largest acute inpatient and rehabilitation hospital for psychiatric patients in the city. Additionally, it is the only acute hospital in San Francisco that provides 24-hour psychiatric emergency services.
A monastic garden was used by many people and for multiple purposes. Gardening was the chief source of food for households, but also encompassed orchards, cemeteries and pleasure gardens, as well as providing plants for medicinal and cultural uses. For monasteries, gardens were especially important in supplying the monks livelihood, primarily due to the fact that many of the plants had multiple uses: for instance, peaches were used for closing wounds.
California School of Podiatric Medicine at Samuel Merritt University is a podiatric medical school based in Oakland, California. It is one of eleven podiatric medical schools in the United States. The college is accredited by the American Podiatric Medical Association's Council on Podiatric Medical Education.
Scivias is an illustrated work by Hildegard von Bingen, completed in 1151 or 1152, describing 26 religious visions she experienced. It is the first of three works that she wrote describing her visions, the others being Liber vitae meritorum and De operatione Dei. The title comes from the Latin phrase Sci vias Domini. The book is illustrated by 35 miniature illustrations, more than that are included in her two later books of visions.
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Friends of Laguna Honda is a name used over the years by Laguna Honda Hospital Volunteers supporting Laguna Honda Hospital and Rehabilitation Center (LHH), a 62-acre skilled nursing and rehabilitation center owned and operated by the San Francisco Department of Public Health.
The Catholic Church is the largest non-government provider of health care services in the world. It has around 18,000 clinics, 16,000 homes for the elderly and those with special needs, and 5,500 hospitals, with 65 percent of them located in developing countries. In 2010, the Church's Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Health Care Workers said that the Church manages 26% of the world's health care facilities. The Church's involvement in health care has ancient origins.
The history of medicine in the Philippines discusses the folk medicinal practices and the medical applications used in Philippine society from the prehistoric times before the Spaniards were able to set a firm foothold on the islands of the Philippines for over 300 years, to the transition from Spanish rule to fifty-year American colonial embrace of the Philippines, and up to the establishment of the Philippine Republic of the present. Although according to Dr. José Policarpio Bantug in his book A Short History of Medicine in the Philippines During The Spanish Regime, 1565-1898 there were "no authentic monuments have come down to us that indicate with some certainty early medical practices" regarding the "beginnings of medicine in the Philippines" a historian from the United States named Edward Gaylord Borne described that the Philippines became "ahead of all the other European colonies" in providing healthcare to ill and invalid people during the start of the 17th century, a time period when the Philippines was a colony of Spain. From the 17th and 18th centuries, there had been a "state-of-the-art medical and pharmaceutical science" developed by Spanish friars based on Filipino curanderos that was "unique to the [Philippine] islands."
Lydia Gertrude Giberson was a Canadian-born psychiatrist. She was employed by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in New York City from 1932 until her retirement in 1960. She was the first woman assistant vice president of Metropolitan Life.
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Mélanie Lipinska (1865–1933) was a Polish-French physician and known as a historian of women in medicine. She received recognition for her thesis Histoire des femmes médecins, which she submitted to the Académie de médecine de Paris in 1900.
Slow medicine is a movement calling for change in medical practice which took inspiration from the wider slow food movement. Practitioners of slow medicine have published several different definitions, but the common emphasis is on the word "slow," meaning to allow the medical practitioner to have sufficient time with the patient. Like the slow food movement, slow medicine calls for more balance, countering the over-emphasis on fast processes which reduce quality.
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