Plot
The film is set in a teaching hospital in Manhattan and centers around Dr. Bock (George C Scott), the Chief of Medicine, whose life is in disarray: his wife has left him, his children don't talk to him, and his once-beloved teaching hospital is falling apart.
The hospital suffers from the sudden deaths of two doctors and a nurse. These are attributed to coincidental or unavoidable failures to provide accurate treatment.
At the same time, administrators must deal with a protest against the hospital's annexation of an adjacent and decrepit apartment building. The annexation is to be used for a drug rehabilitation center; the building's current occupants demand that the hospital find them replacement housing before the building is demolished despite the building being condemned sometime before.
As Dr. Bock complains of impotence and has thoughts of suicide, he falls for Barbara Drummond (Diana Rigg), a patient's daughter who both came from Mexico for her father's treatment. This temporarily gives Dr. Bock something to live for after Barbara confronts him.
The deaths are discovered to have initiated by Barbara's father, as retribution for the "inhumanity" of modern medical treatment. Drummond's victims would have been saved if they'd received prompt, appropriate treatment -- but they didn't. Dr. Bock and Barbara use a final, accidental death of a doctor at the hospital to cover Drummond's tracks, while Barbara takes her father back to JFK airport to escape back to Mexico; leaving Dr. Bock at his insistence to try and organize the chaotic Hospital.
It was filmed at Metropolitan Hospital Center in New York.
Read more about this topic: The Hospital
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—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
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“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)