University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB)

UTMB grew out of an 1881 statewide vote that placed the University of Texas medical department in Galveston, though it did not open until October 1891, with 23 students and 13 faculty members. Its first home was the Romanesque Revival Ashbel Smith Building, nicknamed Old Red, designed by Galveston architect Nicholas J. Clayton and standing beside the original John Sealy Hospital. The building survived the catastrophic hurricane of 1900, and the university's repairs left the school better equipped than before, including new skylights for the dissection room; in 1901 it also appointed its first woman faculty member, Marie Charlotte Schaefer. The regents took over the John Sealy Hospital nursing school in 1896, and in 1910 Abraham Flexner's national survey judged Galveston the only Texas medical school fit to continue. The branch opened the first children's hospital in Texas in 1915 and later built one of the nation's earliest pediatrics departments. In 1949 Herman A. Barnett broke the school's color barrier as its first African American medical student (the state initially routed his enrollment through Texas Southern University, and he was formally enrolled at UTMB in 1950), and in 1953 he became the first Black graduate of a Texas medical school. Hurricane Ike flooded nearly every campus building in 2008, prompting a rebuilding effort costing more than $1 billion. Today UTMB runs schools of medicine, nursing, health professions, public health and biomedical sciences, a Level I trauma center, and the high-containment Galveston National Laboratory.

Sources: en.wikipedia.orgtshaonline.orgtshaonline.orgutmb.edu