The Curse of D.C. General
Is it time to put the city's only public hospital out of its misery?
Cover Story
The 15-year-old kid has been nicked in the shin by a bullet meant for someone else, but he doesn't let that keep him down. As paramedics whisk him through the automatic doors to the emergency room of D.C. General Hospital, he's half out of his stretcher, re-enacting the scene of that afternoon's shooting at Metropolitan Police Department headquarters. “And the gunman turned like this...,” he's saying, wheeling his torso around and taking aim with an imaginary TEC-9 before a nurse presses him gently back onto the sheet.
Pretty soon, he's unconscious and his black denims have been cut away, exposing the superficial wound, which a resident swiftly treats. He awakens in the Minor Trauma unit of the ER, next to a heavily sedated man who lost a chunk of leg flesh to his own Rottweiler. Standing over the kid are two uniformed D.C. cops and a detective wearing a suit, who shoos me away. Blood seeps slowly through the gauze on the kid's leg and pools on the bedsheet. The cops go back to debating the pros and cons of Rottweilers as a breed.
Every patient seems to have his or her own police escort here, which is just one of the things about D.C. General Hospital that surprised acting Executive Director Dennis Gowie when he took over the hospital last August. The gleam of handcuffs on a blue-gowned patient is an everyday sight at D.C. General, which is the primary care provider for D.C. inmates. I watch a corrections officer lead a shackled prisoner onto an elevator, while another keeps an eye on a prisoner in the trauma unit who attempted to hang himself at Lorton, failed, and is now handcuffed to his stretcher.... Continued 
Issue of Dec. 9 - 15, 1994
News and Features
- The Curse of D.C. General
Cover Story - Grand (Extensive, Immense, August, Proud, Eloquent, Exalted, High-Flown) Hotel
Feature - This Committee Will Come to Order— and Dissolve
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The City - Vermin Über Alles!!!!
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The City - Railing at Metro
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The Mail - Hellfire and Taxes
The Mail - Blues Traveler
The Mail
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