Hi!
(T_T)
I already mentioned on other occasions how awesome the hospital system is.
After losing one dwarf in my current fortress to the traction bench (and in a previous one, one dwarf because I created the hospital while she was already wounded), I had two dwarves with nasty wounds and they fully recovered (although they waited for a year before treatment began). Interestingly enough, even though they had broken bones, which stayed broken until treatment began, they seem to have healed completely the moment treatment was finished. It seems that once treatment is finished, the year they already rested gets counted towards their recovery.
Because, I was looking forward to see how the crutches work, so I checked on the dwarves when I saw they weren't resting anymore - and found them completely healed where there had been a red wound a short while ago. Only one of the two needed cleaning, though.
My approach to cleaning is not a dedicated well (I haven't had the spare dwarves to engage in that yet), but rather produce only as much soap as the hospital claims. As long as you do that, the soap will work properly and without any problems at all - no unnecessary error messages, no unnecessary hauling around, and it will be used in cleaning the patients. (However, directly after cleaning a patient, the soap bar will still be existent and may trigger one or two error messages before the hospital speaks up and says "Hey! That's mine!")
Marconius: Friendlies always went to the graveyard as far as I remember (save maybe dwarves, I am not sure about that). Only pets claimed by a dwarf would be buried, so stray animals, war/hunting animals, and any cats will not be buried. This has been around also for a long time.
Deathworks