At dawn on July 14, 1970, over a hundred Young Lords occupied the decrepit Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx — the "butcher shop" where Carmen Rodríguez had died in a botched procedure — flying the Puerto Rican flag from its roof and issuing demands for community-worker control, door-to-door preventive care, and a new building. With allies in the hospital's own staff collective, they ran patient advocacy and screening programs during the twelve-hour occupation and left without convictions.
The health offensives — tuberculosis-truck seizures, lead-poisoning testing drives, and with the Panthers the first acupuncture-based detox program at Lincoln — forced the city to build the new Lincoln Hospital and wrote the Lords into public-health history. The Patient Bill of Rights adopted nationally traces in part to the demands nailed up that morning.