This collection features some of the influential people in that helped shaped the Texas Medical Center beginnings and history.
Texas Medical Center was proposed by Horace Wilkins, Col. William Bates, and John H. Freeman, the trustees of the M.D. Anderson Foundation. Established by cotton magnate Monroe Dunaway Anderson in 1936, the Foundation supported a variety of small causes until Anderson’s death in 1939, which the trustees, with the encouragement of Ernst Bertner, M.D., and Frederick Elliott, D.D.S., decided the funds should be used to build a medical center on par with Johns Hopkins and the Mayo Clinic. It would be located on a site adjacent to Hermann Hospital, which had opened south of downtown in 1925.
The Texas Medical Center was officially incorporated in 1946 and Bertner was appointed president, replaced at the Cancer Hospital by R. Lee Clark, . The Anderson Foundation made grants to Methodist Hospital, Shriners Hospital for Crippled Children, St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital, Texas Children’s Hospital, a new building for Hermann Hospital, and for a library.
For additional questions about this collection, contact an archivist at 713-799-7145, 713-799-7165 or mcgovern@library.tmc.edu
Browse the People Who Shaped Texas Medical Center Beginnings Collections:
Ernst William Bertner, MD Papers
James Greenwood Sr. and Jr., MDs Papers
Murdina MacFarquhar Desmond, MD Papers