Medical & Science:
The Texas Medical Center’s roots go back some 90 years.
When the sun rose outside the six-story Hermann Hospital 90 years ago, tuberculosis patients were wheeled onto the stucco building’s balconies.
They gazed across rice fields and deep green woods while taking in sun therapy.
“There was nothing but forest and swamps,” Houston historian William Kellar said.
Generations later, the French doors that led to the balconies were replaced and sealed shut, falling victim to sanitation requirements. The former operating room area, which was on the top floor, is now a board room.
And the swampland has given way to more than 1,300 acres of pavement, concrete, steel and glass, where such medical legends as Denton Cooley, Michael A. DeBakey and James “Red” Duke built a reputation for world-renowned health care.
Light rail trains cut through the sprawling Texas Medical Center, now home to 56 hospitals, medical schools and other institutions. The facilities host more than 8 million patient visits a year, including 750,000 emergency room visits.
More than 100,0000 people swarm to work at all hours of the day and night, and about 180,000 surgeries are performed each year. A child is born every 20 minutes.
Former U.S. President George H.W. Bush and first lady Barbara – who described the medical center as “Houston’s gift to the world”– have sought treatment there, as have the Duke of Windsor, band leader Guy Lombardo and Black Sabbath’s lead singer Ronnie James Dio. Former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords came for lengthy rehabilitation after surviving a 2011 shooting.
“Every time I drive to school I’m in awe,” said Brandon Esianor, who is entering his third year at McGovern Medical School, which is part of the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston.
The skyline alone would be the envy of many cities, let alone the billions of dollars a year pumped into the economy.
“This is like a medical city it is massive,” said Dr. Robert Robbins, Texas Medical Center’s president and chief executive officer.
“It has grown and grown and grown,” Robbins said. “I’m looking out the window with amazement.”
Perhaps none of this would have happened if it were not for George Hermann, the Houston oilman and philanthropist who didn’t live to see the hospital that bears his name.
Hermann died in 1914, leaving a will and trust that provided land and money to establish Houston’s first nondenominational and charitable hospital.
It was followed in coming decades by the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, the Baylor University College of Medicine, Texas Children’s Hospital, Methodist Hospital and a complex of educational institutions associated with the UT Health Science Center at Houston.
“Who would have ever dreamed that this would happen?” said Marshall Heins, chief facilities officer for Memorial Hermann Health System.
Eleven years after Hermann’s hospital opened, a donation from Monroe Dunaway Anderson was used to launch a foundation that created what is now the world-renowned University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.
In 1943, voters approved the sale of 134 acres of Hermann Park land for a medical center. The vote was a landslide in favor of the sale, but for a city with nearly 400,000 residents, it drew the slightest of voter turnouts: 910 to 41.
“The Anderson Foundation will use the land for a medical center which will include the Texas University Dental School, the Baylor University Medical School, the Cancer Research Clinic, the Tuberculosis Hospital, Hermann Hospital and other research institutions,” notes an article on the same page of the Houston Chronicle as news reports on Nazi prisoners complaining about “wild men from Texas.”
The beginning came slowly because of limitations on nondefense-related construction during World War II.
MD Anderson first opened on the Baker Estate on Baldwin Street by bringing in Quonset huts – military surplus – to help accommodate patients.
With the war’s end, medical center construction surged. The first building to open on the 134-acres of the Texas Medical Center proper was that of Baylor University College of Medicine in 1947. Baylor had relocated from Dallas specifically to be part of the Medical Center.
In 1949, ground was broken for a new Methodist Hospital and by 1951, for the Texas Children’s Hospital, which in 1954 admitted its first patient, 3-year-old Lamaina Leigh Van Wagner for a kidney disorder.
The 1950s and 1960s saw the rise of dueling heart experts.
DeBakey, chairman of surgery at Baylor and chief of surgery at Methodist Hospital, developed the first operations to repair degenerating abdominal aortas, leading the way to open heart surgery and the development of Dacron as a replacement for the failing blood vessels.
Cooley, at the Texas Heart Institute, performed the first successful heart transplant in the United States and became the first doctor to implant an artificial heart in a human.
DeBakey accused Cooley of stealing the heart from a Baylor lab and using it without permission, setting off a decades-long feud that finally ended in 2007, just a few years before DeBakey died at age 99.
Ben Taub Hospital came in 1963, developing a reputation for trauma care and becoming the cornerstone for treating countless people who were uninsured or undocumented.
The 1970s and beyond brought new breakthroughs in medicine.
In 1976, Red Duke founded Hermann Hospital’s Life Flight, the first private hospital air ambulance service in Texas. Its helicopters have now flown more than 140,000 missions.
And Memorial HermannTexas Medical Center, as that original hospital is now known, continues to grow.
Today, the hospital is 2.5 million square feet and with a current expansion, it will grow to 3.84 million square feet. By comparison, NRG Stadium is about 1.9 million square feet.
It should be no surprise that the medical complex emerged in Houston, Kellar said.
“Houston is not a place people come to for the scenery or climate,” he said. “People come here with ideas, to work and make money; it is a real entrepreneurial city.”