The hospital remembers everything.
The hospital remembers every patient, the day of entry and of discharge, the medications administered and treatments undergone. The hospital remembers every doctor, every nurse, every therapist, pharmacist, janitor, receptionist, and candy striper, all of whom are interchangeable. The candy striper could become a surgeon, the surgeon a patient, the patient a cadaver for the medical students to dissect. The hospital does not care, it merely inventories and catalogues. The men and women of the hospital inventory and catalogue and supervise and approve and face the public and hide from spotlights. The hospital knows it is larger than the sum of its employees and patients and visitors and beds and bandages.
The hospital is, was, and will be.
Catholic, Jewish, Methodist, veterans, city, municipal, for profit, for charity—the hospital does not care. It is for itself. It feeds on the bodies that pass through its doors, and more bodies always come. The bodies are born, they live, they die, while the hospital endures.
The hospital is, was, and will be.