Baylor's medical school began in Dallas in 1900 and was one of only two Texas medical schools to survive Abraham Flexner's harsh review of American medical education, but in 1943 it accepted Houston's invitation to anchor a brand-new medical center on the edge of Hermann Park. It opened in a converted Sears building and in 1947 moved into the Cullen Building, becoming the first institution to settle in the Texas Medical Center. The arrival of surgeon Michael E. DeBakey in 1948 helped turn it into a force in heart surgery and research, and it became independent of Baylor University in 1969. This short walk starts at the original building and museum, then visits the hospitals where Baylor doctors have trained and practiced for generations.
About this site
Baylor College of Medicine is a private college or university in Houston, Harris County. It is one of 22 degree-granting colleges and universities TexasRoam maps in Harris County.
The site sits at 29.7107, -95.3966 near Houston. The nearest cataloged historic site is Roy and Lillie Cullen Building (historical marker), about under a tenth of a mile away. Others within a short drive include Michael E. DeBakey Library and Museum, Pioneer Memorial Log House, and San Jacinto Chapter of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas.
Baylor College of Medicine was born in Dallas in 1900 as a proprietary school oddly titled the University of Dallas Medical Department, even though no University of Dallas existed yet. Three physicians incorporated it that September, and it began teaching that fall (Nov. 19, 1900, by the Handbook of Texas count; the college itself gives Oct. 30) with 81 students in the former Temple Emanu-El synagogue on Commerce Street. It joined forces with Baylor University in Waco in 1903, becoming Baylor University College of Medicine, and it and the state's Galveston medical branch were the only Texas medical schools to come through Abraham Flexner's scathing 1911 report intact. A bitter dispute in Dallas over the school's denominational control led it to accept the M. D. Anderson Foundation's 1943 invitation to join the new Texas Medical Center, and classes resumed in Houston on July 12, 1943, in a remodeled Sears, Roebuck building. Four years later the college moved into the Roy and Lillie Cullen Building, the first building finished in the medical center. Michael E. DeBakey took over the surgery department in 1948, and his team's vascular surgery work in the 1950s, including better Dacron artery grafts, brought the school international attention; a graduate school of biomedical sciences opened in 1949. In 1969 the college and Baylor University parted ways by mutual agreement, and as the independent, nonsectarian Baylor College of Medicine it gained access to federal research money, with DeBakey serving as president through 1979. Today it comprises schools of medicine, biomedical sciences, health professions and tropical medicine, is part owner of Baylor St. Luke's Medical Center, and has long ranked among the country's leading medical schools in federal research support.
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