The Hospital

The personal life of Dr. Herbert Bock, the Chief of Medicine at Manhattan Medical Center, which also operates as a teaching hospital, is in shambles as he and his longtime wife have split once again after years of a dysfunctional marriage - he having moved into a shabby hotel - and blames himself both for the way their two now grown offspring turned out and thus the reason for not much liking them. He will be walking into this day at the hospital which seems to be in equal shambles, his ability to cope not great seeing as to his personal situation. Beyond a demonstration outside the hospital in protest to they developing an adjacent property, the demonstration with which the frazzled Chief of Administrative, Dr. John Sundstrom, will primarily have to deal, a young resident Dr. Howard Schaefer has been discovered dead in one of the hospital beds, in what at first glance looks to be a case of malpractice of the hospital. These two items are just the highest profile, at least for staff, of the many problems that are emerging at the hospital this day as they have to put out one fire after another, those fires seemingly caused by mismanagement and/or incompetence. But as more medical staff are found dead around the hospital by unusual circumstances, there may more at play this day than initially thought. Through all this chaos, Bock may find some meaning in life in dealing with the case of patient Edward Drummond, who came into the hospital a relatively healthy man, but who has fallen into a coma the result of that staff mismanagement/incompetence. That meaning comes in the form of Drummond's daughter, Barbara Drummond, an RN herself, who wants to take her father back to Mexico where he had been doing missionary work.