UTMB Galveston Campus Tour

The University of Texas Medical Branch opened in Galveston in 1891 as the state university's medical department, and for a time a single red Romanesque building held the entire school. Galveston was then one of the wealthiest cities in Texas, with a medical tradition going back to a college founded in 1865 and a Catholic hospital opened in 1867. The campus has since survived the 1900 Storm and Hurricane Ike in 2008, rebuilding each time with help from island philanthropies such as the Sealy & Smith Foundation. This walk begins at Old Red and the marker for Texas's earliest medical college, then moves through the library, the hospitals, and the research lab, ending at the site of the old St. Mary's Infirmary.

Texas medicine grew up on Galveston Island, and this walk through the University of Texas Medical Branch follows it from a single red building to a sprawling academic health center that has weathered both the 1900 Storm and Hurricane Ike.

Old Red, formally the Ashbel Smith Building, is the showpiece: a massive Romanesque landmark of red brick, granite and sandstone by Galveston architect Nicholas J. Clayton. At its dedication in October 1891 it was the Medical Branch's only building, serving just 23 students, and its top-floor anatomy amphitheater, restored after Ike, is being developed as a medical museum. The island's medical roots go back further still: the Galveston Medical College, opened in 1865 and regarded as the first medical college in Texas, started with little more than a skeleton, an obstetrical model and a few anatomy charts.

The walk also traces the institution's growth, from the rare books and archives of Moody Medical Library's history-of-medicine collections to John Sealy Hospital, the Medical Branch's main teaching hospital for more than a century. You'll see how the campus rebuilt after Ike flooded it in 2008 and pass one of the country's two NIH-backed national biocontainment laboratories. The story of St. Mary's Infirmary, opened in 1867 by three French Catholic sisters and overwhelmed within months by a yellow fever epidemic, completes a picture of how an island city shaped Texas medicine.

It's a compact, thought-provoking walk for anyone curious about the history of health care in Texas.