July 23, 2011

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 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.