The Gesundheit! Hospital Project
The Gesundheit Hospital is a proposal for a model health care system aimed at changing society.
The Gesundheit Hospital started in the 1970s with a pilot project that is described in Gesundheit! by Patch Adams, M.D., and was the basis for a motion picture. The Gesundheit Hospital is a proposal for a forty-bed rural community hospital in West Virginia.
Humanitarian clowning involves taking clowns to hospitals, prisons, even refugee camps and war zones to bring food, medicine and hope. We have taken clowns into the war in Bosnia and refugee camps in Macedonia, South African AIDS orphanages, to Haiti and Cuba...
...in 2002, twenty-two clowns from all six continents took ten tons of aid to war-torn Kabul, Afghanistan.

My friend Josh Walters was working at the Gesundheit! as a clown and grounds keeper. I went to visit him in Hillsboro WV. During my stay my participation was fun, interesting, and inspiring. It’s a great hope to see a dream in the process of coming true. Patch Adams’ work is a true testament to humanity.
While walking round the hospital grounds I was taken by an old fire truck. This truck symbolized certainty, hope, and triumph. I had to draw it. During the drawing process, I seemed to sense the many lives this truck affected. Visions of cat rescues and happy little children passed my imagination. I saw fire emergencies and sirens, rescues from several story buildings, tired men riding home after a long nights work battling a fire, soap suds and laughter, and a communities excitement when the big red fire truck rolls slowly down high street during the forth of July parade.