Donald W. Seldin; powered U. of Texas medical school

When Dr. Donald W. Seldin arrived in Dallas for the first time, in January 1951, he asked a gas station attendant for directions to the country’s newest medical school. Seldin, a Yale University graduate and retired Army doctor, had just accepted an appointment at what was then Southwestern Medical School, part of the University of Texas system.

He had never seen the school, and when he followed the attendant’s directions, he found only converted, dilapidated military barracks, an old brick building and a pile of garbage.

Seldin had already given up his youthful love of poetry for the more lucrative career of medicine and now realized he had traded a faculty position at Yale for what appeared to be a broken-down, backwater posting in internal medicine.

Yet despite the pocked floors, busted windows and dispirited faculty – all of his fellow physicians deserted him within a year – Seldin remained at the school and, as chairman of internal medicine from 1952 to 1988, built it into one of the country’s premier research institutions.

Seldin died April 25 at his home in Dallas, said his wife, Ellen Taylor Seldin. He was 97 and had lymphoma.

Now known as UT Southwestern Medical Center, it is home to a medical culture acclaimed for its combination of academic rigor and humane caregiving, and the faculty has received six Nobel Prizes.