Medicine: Hospital on the River

Where Manhattan's 68th Street deadends at the East River stands a striking group of stone and brick buildings known admiringly in the medical profession as "the great white palace"—officially, the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center. At one side, overlooking both the river's traffic and the swirling autos of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive, rises the nine-story building of the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic.

There are no outward signs that Payne Whitney is a hospital for the emotionally ill, for there are no fences, no guards, no barred windows. Yet this 108-bed hospital ranks...