Secret Clinics Tend to Bahrain's Wounded Ed Ou for The New York Times A protester's wound was redressed in a house acting as a makeshift clinic after she was hit by a police tear-gas canister. MANAMA, Bahrain - Three young men were slumped on a living room mat, groaning with pain from nuggets of birdshot lodged in a cheek, a forehead and under the lid of an eye. Bahrain's nightly protests had exacted their reliable toll. Friends dragged the men away from the clashes and the riot police, to a safe house nearby. Soon, it was time to go, but not to a hospital: the police were there, too. "No one goes to the hospital," one protester said. Instead, the men traveled to one of dozens of houses that are scattered throughout this island nation, where a secret and growing network of caregivers - doctors, first-aid medics or people with no medical experience at all - wait daily for the casualties from the protests. The houses are not really field hospitals, but rather sitting rooms, often equipped with nothing more than bandages and gauze. For the injured protesters, the houses have replaced the country's largest public hospital, the Salmaniya Medical Complex, which has been a crucial site in the conflict between Bahrain's ruling monarchy and its opponents since the beginning of a popular uprising in February 2011. Activists say that because of a heavy security presence at the hospital, protesters - or people fearful of being associated with Bahrain's opposition - have been afraid to venture there for more than a year. That reluctance, officials and activists say, may be responsible for several deaths. Last spring, the hospital became a symbol of the state's repression, as the government arrested - and in some cases tortured - protesters, doctors and nurses for their involvement with the uprising. As its problems persist, Salmaniya has come to represent Bahrain's dangerous impasse, marked by a growing rift between the country's Shiite majority, which has long complained of official discrimination, and the Sunni political elite. The authorities continue to prosecute Shiite doctors who worked at the hospital on charges including plotting to overthrow the government. Some of the doctors say their arrests represented a purge of Shiites, allowing the government to replace them with Sunni loyalists. A report released Monday by Physicians for Human Rights says some of the current problems at Salmaniya stem from the conduct of security forces in the hospital and at its gates. People interviewed by the group said guards stopped arriving cars and questioned the passengers. They asked what village they were from, a way of telling whether someone was Shiite or Sunni. People with physical injuries, including those possibly related to the impact of tear-gas canisters, are brought inside for additional interrogation. The report said that the hospital's chief executive, Dr. Waleed Khalifa al-Manea, had urged the Interior Ministry, which oversees security at Salmaniya, to stop the practice. A 27-year-old woman said fears about the hospital, which she called "militarized," drove her to take a first-aid class to help the protesters in her village and elsewhere. The woman, who asked not to be identified because she feared reprisal, said the course, held in secret over four days in a Shiite community center, was taught by a doctor who was arrested at the Salmaniya hospital in the spring. Thirty-seven other people also attended, including a few grandmothers, she said, adding that hundreds of people had taken the course. Now, the woman travels with medical supplies in her purse to government-approved protests held by the mainstream opposition, as well as to the more regular, unauthorized standoffs between young protesters and the police. The medics treat the burns from the incendiary devices that some of the protesters throw, and bandage the scars from the tear-gas canisters and birdshot the police fire at them. The work was scary at first, she said, but "I got used to it." "It became normal," the woman said in an interview in a private home. A day or two doesn't pass without us seeing injuries. A 23-year-old woman named Zeinab arrived for treatment of an arm wound caused, she said, when a policeman fired a tear-gas canister at her from a few feet away as she filmed a protest.