Dr. Victoria Sweet is a physician, historian, and storyteller who bridges the worlds of science and the humanities. She’s an

Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine at UCSF and holds a PhD in medical history. A California native and fourth-generation San Franciscan, she studied math and classics at Stanford, started a PhD in psychology at Harvard, then switched tracks and earned her medical degree from UC Irvine-eventually finding her true calling in medicine and history combined.

For over 20 years, Dr. Sweet practiced at Laguna Honda Hospital, one of the last old-fashioned almshouses in the U.S., where she experienced a slower, more personal kind of medicine. It was there that she came to see the body not just as a machine to fix, but as a garden to tend-an insight that shaped her writing and her approach to care.

She began writing about her experiences, leading to her first bestselling book, God’s Hotel (2012), followed by Slow Medicine (2017), both of which struck a chord with readers around the world. Her books have opened doors to conversations about what’s missing in modern healthcare-from hospitals and medical schools to courtrooms and boardrooms. In 2024, she published Convictions: A Story of Medicine in the 21st Century, continuing her exploration of what it truly means to heal in today’s fast-paced, tech-driven world.