The storied Walter Reed Army Medical Center is closing its doors after providing care to privates and presidents for more than a century.
Patients and staff will say goodbye to the facility in the nation's capital at a ceremony Wednesday. It will be turned over to the State Department and District of Columbia in September.
A government commission voted in 2005 to close the hospital as part of a cost-cutting move. Its operations will shift to the Navy hospital in Bethesda and Fort Belvoir, Va.
Only a few years ago the hospital was embroiled in a scandal over shoddy out-patient living conditions. But it led to improved care for the wounded.
Hundreds of thousands of the war wounded since World War I have
received treatment at Walter Reed.
