Scene at Hospital in Haiti's Capital Is Nightmarish

PORT -AU-PRINCE, Haiti (Jan. 17) -- The general hospital in the center of this devastated city reeks of illness and death. The partially collapsed medical complex near the caved-in presidential palace is packed with patients suffering from broken bones, burns and infection.

Surgeons have performed 60 amputations in the past two days on two operating beds. Howls of pain escape into the courtyard, where about 1,000 people wait under the burning sun for medical attention, swatting flies away from open wounds.

Gabi Ali, 8, was transferred from one triage center to the next, finally arriving here, at the Hopital de l'Universite d'Etat d'Haiti, where a coalition of doctors working under the umbrella group International Medical Corps has centralized treatment. Suffering from burns and a spinal injury after his home collapsed and then caught fire, Gabi is alone, orphaned by the earthquake.

Out of IVs and catheters, and running low on plaster and morphine, doctors are mixing oral rehydration salts into water bottles picked up from the airport and sending patients on their way. IMC has attempted to systematize treatment by marking people's left arms with one of three codes that designates how quickly they need attention.

"If the code is three numbers, they need to be seen right away and probably require amputation," explained Margaret Aguirre, the IMC's director of global communications.

"A case that would require immediate care in the U.S. gets the lowest-level triage here," she said.

The roads from the airport to the hospital have been cleared of bodies, said Dominique Louis, a Haitian-American who flew in Saturday from Pompano Beach, Fla., with a group from his nonprofit school Green Children's House.

Signs perched on collapsed apartment buildings declare S.O.S. and that the dead are buried beneath the rubble.

"This is a Haitian holocaust," said Louis, among many volunteers, from Haiti and around the world, assisting doctors at the university hospital.

Richard Jean-Baptiste, 29, a Haitian medical student, was at his university in the Port-au-Prince neighborhood of Petionville when he felt the ground trembling under his feet. Since the Jan. 12 earthquake, he has spent day and night at the hospital.

"The room where I lived is ashes," he said. "It was Thursday that they could pull my roommate out from the rubble."

Jean-Paul Bonnet, a retired doctor from New Jersey, arrived here independently, moving from one dire case to the next in the makeshift orthopedic room.

"Don't bother cleaning the leg -- we'll have to amputate," Bonnet instructed, referring to a woman with an open compound fracture below her right knee.

Ordinarily, the wound would be treated, but it had been allowed to fester since the earthquake struck. If doctors did not amputate, the patient would likely die from infection, Bonnet said.

"It's criminal. The world has to mobilize faster," he said.

The ailing are not far from the dead. When doctors began to arrive to Port-au-Prince late on Jan. 13, they discovered piles of corpses in a field behind the hospital.

"They had to put them somewhere, so why not a hospital," said Robert Fuller, an emergency room doctor at the University of Connecticut working under the auspices of IMC.

"There were probably 400 bodies piled up," he said.

Several buildings at the university hospital complex -- including a nursing school -- crumbled in the quake.

Manouchka Pierre, 25 years old today, is among 100 student nurses presumed to have died, though relatives continued receiving text messages from victims trapped beneath the debris as late as Saturday morning.

"She went to the hospital Tuesday morning. I never saw her again," said her father, Dieubon Pierre. "I am left with one son -- only him and God."

Bloated and deformed, corpses lined the top of the former school, now reduced to a pile of concrete. An industrial lift picked up bodies and dropped them into the bed of a truck, to be delivered to the field behind the hospital, which people have begun referring to as the morgue.

As ghastly as it is, the situation at Port-au-Prince's general hospital has improved in the last 48 hours, said the hospital's director, Alix Lassegue. At first there was no water and no electricity.

"We're beginning to receive more and more supplies and medications and medical teams from abroad to speed up care," Lassegue said.

Still, any sense of order at the hospital complex was disrupted by disorder outside its iron gates. As the sun began to go down, Haitian police rushed in a man with two gunshot wounds -- and a body bag.