Baylor College of Medicine Campus Tour

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.

This walk is rooted in the place where the Texas Medical Center itself began. In 1943 a young medical school from Dallas accepted Houston's invitation to move south, and in 1947 it settled into a pale limestone building funded by oilman Hugh Roy Cullen and his wife Lillie. That Art Deco-trimmed hall is the Roy and Lillie Cullen Building, and it remains the symbolic heart of Baylor College of Medicine, the first institution to settle in the Texas Medical Center.

The story then turns to Michael E. DeBakey, the surgeon who arrived in 1948 and helped make Houston a name in heart surgery worldwide. His library and museum display the manuscripts, instruments and honors of a career that spanned vascular grafts, bypass procedures and artificial heart pumps, and admission is free on weekdays.

The walk also follows Baylor's doctors out along Fannin Street to the hospitals where generations of them have trained, among them Houston Methodist, where DeBakey performed an early coronary bypass in 1964 and heart transplants later that decade, and Texas Children's, one of the country's largest pediatric hospitals.

It's a short walk, but it spans more than eight decades of American medicine, from a converted Sears building to a skyline of hospital towers. Come for the history of one remarkable institution and leave understanding how Houston grew into a medical capital.