Texas Medical Center or TMC is a medical neighborhood located in south-central Houston, Texas. The community has over sixty medical institutions concentrated in a triangular area between Hermann Park, Brays Bayou, and Rice University. Texas Medical Center is home to several clinical facilities for basic science, patient care, and translational research. In this article, we are going to know more about the history of the Texas Medical Center.
History
in 1941, The Texas State Legislature gave funds to the University of Texas to start a cancer research hospital. M.D. Anderson Foundation saw the potential good of this research hospital; that is why they decided to match the state’s gift to the university by giving them funds and land on two simple conditions; the hospital should be established in Houston, and it should be named after its founder.
In 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt approved the purchase of 118 acres of land from the estate of local entrepreneur George Hermann for the construction of a 1,000-bed naval hospital located in Houston. The said hospital was opened in 1946, and it was named Michael E. DeBakey Veterans Affairs Medical Center. It also became a teaching facility for the Baylor College of Medicine. That same year, several projects such as the Baylor St. Luke’s Medical Center, Memorial Hermann–Texas Medical Center, the Texas Medical Center Library, Houston Methodist Hospital, and the Shriners Hospitals for Children, were all approved to be established and included in the Texas Medical Center.
The Texas Institute for Rehabilitation and Research opened in the late 1950s, and the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Hospital and Tumor Institute at Houston opened the Gimbel Research Wing. In 1962, the Texas Heart Institute was leased, and it became an affiliate of the Baylor St. Luke’s Medical Center and Texas Children’s Hospital. At the same time, the Ben Taub General Hospital of the Harris Health System was established in 1963.
The TMC Library gives people access to thousands of journals and current digital books. The John P. McGovern Historical Collections and Research Center in the TMC Library features rare medical books published in the 1500s. Besides that, you can also find historical manuscripts such as the Menninger Collection of Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis, McGovern Collection on the History of Medicine, and the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission which shows the recorded after-effects of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
About
The Texas Medical Center neighborhood has eight specialty institutions, twenty-one hospitals, eight academic and research institutions, seven nursing schools, four medical schools, three public health organizations, a dental school, and two pharmacy schools. That’s a total of 54 medicine-related institutions, all of which are not-for-profit. Among the affiliated medical schools here at the Texas Medical Center are the Baylor College of Medicine, University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, Texas A&M College of Medicine, and the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston.
In 2016, Texas Medical Center performed more heart surgeries than anywhere else in the world, with a whopping 180,000 annual surgeries. They performed one heart surgery every three minutes. Aside from that, the TMC was able to deliver 25,000 babies each year. That’s about one baby every 20 minutes. The Texas Medical Center also offered over 9,200 total patient beds.
Every day, Texas Medical Center receives an average of 3,300 patient visits, and about eight million patient visits every year, this includes over 18,000 international patients. Each year, the TMC entertains about 750,000 ER visitors. In 2011, the center was able to employ over 106,000 people; this includes 20,000 scientists, physicians, researchers as well as other advanced degree professionals in the life sciences sector.
The Texas Medical Center is also home to Texas Children’s Hospital, which is the largest children’s hospital in the world, as well as the world’s largest cancer hospital, MD Anderson Cancer Center.
