It is probably pointless to suggest that all the individuals presently shaping our health care future spend a quiet weekend with “God’s Hotel,” Dr. Victoria Sweet’s transcendent testament to health care past. Who interrupts cowboys in the midst of a stampede?

But if you’re one of the millions of doctors and patients out there choking on their dust, this is the book for you. Its compulsively readable chapters go down like restorative sips of cool water, and its hard-core subversion cheers like a shot of gin.

In “God’s Hotel,” Sweet weaves several interrelated narratives gracefully: her experiences as a physician at Laguna Honda; her pilgrimage by foot from France to Santiago de Campostela in northwest Spain, which she undertook in sections during a series of vacations; the world of Hildegard and medieval medicine; the (alas!) inevitable succumbing of Laguna Honda to “progress.” The old open wards in which patients tended to their more infirm neighbors, we learn, have been replaced by a sleek facility that touts “wellness” programs, “health care data” systems, and flat screen TVs.

Sweet’s tone, in “God’s Hotel,” nicely matches her subject. Her writing has a lovely, antique quality. For example, she almost never refers to Laguna Honda’s exact location. Instead, she calls San Francisco “The City,” as opposed to “The County” — the acute care hospital from which so many Laguna Honda residents arrive. The vagueness of location also conveys a distance in time, as if Sweet were writing from both far away and long ago. She reinforces this impression by launching into anecdotes with the word “now,” as in “Now Mr. Conley was a nice man…,” as if we readers were fellow pilgrims, resting by the side of the road, listening to Sweet tell her story.

Sweet would likely be pleased to have left this impression, because she comes to consider all of life, including medicine, as a kind of pilgrimage. After one of her treks in Europe, she returns to Laguna Honda with a pilgrim’s eye for allegory, seeing those around her as “characters…patients, nurses, delivery men, doctors — with spiritual and moral messages, if I chose to decipher them.” Sweet invites us to view the modernization of Laguna Honda as an allegory, a cautionary tale about what is lost when healers and their patients are replaced by bureaucrats and “clients.”

I can't tell you exactly when it happened, but sometime in the past two decades, the practice of medicine was insidiously morphed into the delivery of health care. If you aren't sure of the difference between the two, then "God's Hotel" is the book for you. It's an engaging book that chronicles this fin-de-siecle phenomenon from the perspective of San Francisco's Laguna Honda Hospital, the last almshouse in the United States.

Dr. Victoria Sweet, a general internist, came to Laguna Honda for a two-month stint more than 20 years ago and ended up staying. Laguna Honda was home to the patients who had nowhere else to go, who were too sick, too poor, too disenfranchised to make it on their own. The vast open wards housed more than a thousand patients, some for years. Laguna Honda was off the grid, and this, Sweet discovered, was to the benefit of the patients.