San Francisco's Laguna Honda Hospital is the last almshouse in the country, a descendant of the ''Hotel-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, lower 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 body and soul.