Hospital + Cemetery = Convenience

What on earth could be more efficient than locating a hospital right next to the largest cemetery in town?

The wise folks at Saline Memorial Hospital in Benton, Ark., must have decided that such efficiency was great, indeed, when they located within spitting distance of a cemetery.

That's a pretty good plan, actually. Should things not go well in the hospital, the formerly ill can be tossed out the window into a burial plot. Very handy, indeed!

By the way, the photo here doesn't do this setup justice. The hospital is the only one in Saline County and, as such, is pretty large. The cemetery is big, too, and runs parallel to one side of the hospital and a good sized chunk of the facility's access streets. In other words, people going to the hospital would have to do some hard core ignoring to miss the fact that they're going to be treated in a facility that's next to a graveyard.

That may be one of the reasons folks around here tend to head to Little Rock when they get serious illnesses -- the hospitals up there are a bit more equipped to handle the really sick sick, and they're not surrounded by tombstones, either.

I grew up thinking the hospital being next to a cemetery was fairly normal. Now that I'm older, I can't help but find such proximity more than a bit disturbing.

Imagine being a patient with a window facing the graveyard. How optimistic would you be about your chances at recovering? Not very, I should think.

The whole thing is just ghoulish.