However, even his most unkind criticisms reflected a bit of truth. We sat on opposite sides of the kitchen table. The morning light spilled through the windows. It was 1973. I was twenty and home from college. At issue were the bricks I put in all the toilets in my family’s house, as a way to reduce water consumption. I didn’t tell him. He discovered it weeks later, when he investigated why it was taking multiple flushes to clear his business. He was not happy. “You’ve got the wounded pigeon syndrome,” he said.

Pasteur Park, a postage stamp of green, fronting the hospital on its Harrison Street side, was dotted with a statue of French scientist Louis Pasteur, a few glum-looking trees, a heliport and a rundown Greek restaurant. People loitered at the front entrance of the hospital smoking and chatting. Cars and buses rumbled down Harrison Street. A vendor hawked newspapers. A garbage can by the entrance overflowed with trash. Pieces of paper and assorted flotsam blew by. The two sets of double doors led into a marble-floored foyer, the floor darkened with gum splotches and grunge, while a Depression-era, age-stained eight-foot granite sculpture of a mother and children watched over the entrance.

I was reassured when my father, despite his reservations about my wounded pigeon tendencies, encouraged me to go. Had we been able to Google at the time, we would have come across an article from July 1970 in the Chicago Tribune Magazine called, “The Trouble with County. Some folks say it rose up from hell. ” It portrayed the gritty politics of County Hospital in the late 1960s and presaged the battles that we would face a decade later. S. But years of near-criminal neglect had rendered it a training backwater, a place for misfits, idealists, foreign-trained doctors seeking an American toehold and radicals with visions of changing the world.