Local History
Texas Medical History Markers: The Doctors, Hospitals, and Epidemics That Shaped Public Health
The first medical college in Texas ran on one skeleton and three anatomy charts. A railroad payroll built Scott & White. Eight markers that trace how Texas built public health.
Photo: Jo Gala / Unsplash. Texas Medical Center, Houston.
Drive down South 31st Street in Temple and you pass a medical campus that employs thousands of people. It started as a railroad company hospital run by two surgeons who split the payroll. Texas has more than 16,000 official state historical markers, and a lot of them stand outside hospitals, nursing schools, cemeteries, and doctors’ front doors. RoadHistorical is a Texas historical preservation platform that tells you when one is coming up on your route. This guide covers eight of them, and the story they tell together is how Texas built public health out of almost nothing.
Texas Medicine Started on a Galveston Street Corner
Galveston Medical College was the first medical college in Texas. It opened in 1865 as a branch of Soule University at Chappell Hill. The teaching equipment that first session was one skeleton, one obstetrical dummy, and three anatomy charts. The marker notes the instruction was still equal to most American medical schools of the day.
The school moved three times in eight years. Enrollment reached 46 by 1873, and students were cleared to attend patients at the Island City Hospital. Texas law required every corpse to be buried, so students went back later and disinterred the bodies of some indigents to dissect them. The marker says so plainly. In 1873 the school reorganized under Dr. Ashbel Smith, a surgeon and Texas statesman the plaque calls brilliant and fiery-tempered. The medical branch of the University of Texas was established on this ground in 1891.
900 The Strand, Galveston, TX. Find it in RoadHistorical before your visit.
A quarter mile away, St. Mary’s Hospital marks the first private hospital in the state. Three French Catholic Sisters of the Order of Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word organized it in 1866 and named it Charity Hospital. It opened for patients on April 1, 1867, on land that had been part of Fort Scurry during the Civil War.
Three months after the doors opened, yellow fever swept Galveston. The epidemic killed the hospital Superior, Mother M. Blandine. The Sisters answered it by founding an orphanage and a school for children whose parents died of the sickness. St. Mary’s stayed open through the 1900 hurricane that tore into the building. It treated the injured again in 1947, after the chemical explosions and fires at the port of Texas City.
404 8th St., Galveston, TX. Find it in RoadHistorical before your visit.
A Railroad Payroll Built the Largest Practice in Texas
The Gulf, Colorado, and Santa Fe Railway laid out the town of Temple in 1881 and put a railway hospital there in 1891. Dr. Arthur Carroll Scott became chief surgeon in 1892. He hired Dr. Raleigh R. White, Jr. in 1895 and promoted him to co-chief surgeon by 1897. That same year the two men opened a private partnership, and in 1904 they opened their own hospital, the Temple Sanitarium. The Scott & White Hospital marker tells the rest.
The sanitarium took the Scott & White name in 1922 and spread across six downtown blocks. It trained nurses and doctors, added specialty divisions after World War II, and built a national research reputation. The practice moved to its current site in 1963. By 1995 it employed more than 6,000 people and recorded over a million patient visits. Two railroad surgeons ended up running the largest group practice in the state.
2401 S. 31st St., Temple, TX. Find it in RoadHistorical before your visit.
The Scott and White School of Nursing opened the same year as the sanitarium. Classes met in a former Catholic convent at South Fifth Street and Avenue F in Temple, taught by the two doctors and a nursing superintendent. Scott and White built the program on Florence Nightingale’s philosophy.
By 1946 the training included a liberal arts education through Temple Junior College. By 1949 it ranked among the top nursing programs in the country. Administrators started a two-year phase-out of the diploma program in 1968 and shifted to a baccalaureate program at Mary Hardin-Baylor College. Across 66 years, 1,233 nurses graduated. Their marker stands on the Mary Hardin-Baylor campus in Belton, in front of Wells Science Hall.
900 College St., Belton, TX. Find it in RoadHistorical before your visit.
Two Doctors Who Treated a Town and Then Changed It
Dr. Lawrence A. Nixon (1883-1966) was born in Marshall, attended Wiley College and Meharry Medical College, and started practicing in Cameron. He moved to El Paso in January 1910 after witnessing violent racial strife in that community. His first wife, Esther, and their infant son followed him west.
Nixon became a charter member of the El Paso NAACP chapter. Then he sued his own state. Texas law barred African Americans from voting in the Democratic primary. Nixon carried that fight to the U.S. Supreme Court twice, in Nixon v. Herndon and Nixon v. Condon. He won both. Texas found ways around the rulings for almost two decades. The precedent held in 1944, and that year Nixon and his second wife, Drusilla, cast primary ballots. He practiced for 53 years and retired in 1963.
3231 E Wyoming Ave, El Paso, TX. Find it in RoadHistorical before your visit.
In Taylor, northeast of Austin, Dr. James Lee Dickey was the town’s only African American physician. He was born in McLennan County in 1893 and attended Waco public schools and Tillotson College in Austin. World War I service interrupted his training at Meharry. He graduated in 1921 and came back to central Texas to help his widowed mother raise eight siblings.
Dickey went after causes instead of symptoms. He called for improvements to the local water supply. He headed the community effort against a typhoid fever outbreak in 1932 and 1933. A clinic he opened in a house during that outbreak grew until it served the surrounding counties. He built infant care programs and pushed to get African American patients admitted to state tubercular clinics. Then he took on school bonds, recreation facilities, and federal housing. Taylor’s Chamber of Commerce named him Man of the Year in 1952. His marker quotes him directly: “to live in the hearts of those we leave behind is not to die.”
500 Burkett Street, Taylor, TX. Find it in RoadHistorical before your visit.
The Places Texas Built for the Patients Nobody Else Took
The Texas Legislature passed a law in 1911 calling for state institutions to treat tuberculosis. The first one opened in 1912 across the highway from where the Anti-Tuberculosis Colony No. 1 marker now stands, near Carlsbad in Tom Green County. It started with room for 57 patients on 330 acres.
It turned into a town. At its height it filled 36 buildings on 992 acres and averaged 2,000 residents. On site were a post office, library, public school, power plant, dairy, vegetable garden, bakery, and butcher shop. A tuberculosis nursing school opened there in 1915 and graduated 500 nurses by 1961. The place was renamed the State Sanatorium in 1919, then McKnight State Tuberculosis Hospital in 1955 for Dr. J. B. McKnight, superintendent from 1914 to 1950. Most patients stayed nine months. Fifty thousand adults and 5,000 children were treated before anti-tubercular drugs and thoracic surgery closed it in 1971.
US 87, Carlsbad, TX. Find it in RoadHistorical before your visit.
The Legislature authorized Terrell State Hospital in 1883 and it opened in 1885 under Dr. D. R. Wallace, whom the marker calls an internationally recognized pioneer psychiatrist. It admitted 330 patients its first year. By 1920 it held 2,300 and was the largest hospital of its kind west of the Mississippi.
Nothing original is left standing. A fountain in the circular park and the old water tower are the only survivors. Wallace has a marker of his own in Waco, at 2124 S. 5th St., Waco, TX. It records that he helped form the state and local medical associations. Then he was named to head asylum facilities in Austin and Terrell.
Brin Circle, Terrell State Hospital, Terrell, TX. Find it in RoadHistorical before your visit.
How RoadHistorical Finds These Markers
Most of these plaques sit where you would never think to stop. A nursing school marker in front of a science hall in Belton. A physician’s marker on a corner in Taylor. Discovery Mode runs while you drive and tells you when one is coming up. You hear about it before you pass it, not a mile after. Stopping at a marker is how preservation actually works. A plaque nobody reads is a plaque nobody funds.
The plaque itself is only ever a few hundred words. Ask the AI Tour Guide why the Legislature funded a tuberculosis colony in 1911. Ask what a railway hospital association actually was. You get the context the metal ran out of room for. Offline mode matters here too. US 87 out to Carlsbad drops cell coverage in places. The app keeps working anyway.
Start Discovering Texas History Today
RoadHistorical is free to download on iPhone and Android. Download it here and turn on Discovery Mode before your next drive. Android users can download RoadHistorical from Google Play.
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