Arthur Edward Spohn, M.D. and Spohn Hospital

Spohn's route to Corpus Christi ran through three countries. Born at Ancaster, Ontario, in 1845, he studied at McGill and Michigan, taught anatomy in New York, and reached Texas in 1868 as the surgeon running the military quarantine at Galveston. He practiced at Mier, in Tamaulipas, before settling in Corpus Christi in 1872. The Handbook of Texas credits him with a tourniquet for bloodless operations in 1870 and, on November 20, 1891, the first Porro-Caesarean delivery for osteomalacia in the United States. He was also chief surgeon of the St. Louis, Brownsville and Mexico Railway.

What the plaque says

Arthur Edward Spohn, M.D. and Spohn Hospital One of three brothers who became doctors, A.E. Spohn (1845-1913) was born in Canada and studied medicine in Michigan and New York. He came to the Texas Gulf Coast in 1868 as a U.S. surgeon in charge of military quarantine. He settled in Corpus Christi after his marriage in 1876 to Sarah Josephine Kenedy (1857-1918) daughter of steamboat captain and rancher Mifflin Kenedy. A prominent local physician, Dr. Spohn was also a leader in numerous medical organizations. The first hospital named in his honor was Spohn Sanitarium, built in 1905 on North Beach, with funds contributed by Mr. and Mrs. John Gregory Kenedy, Mrs. Henrietta King, Mr. and Mrs. Robert J. Kleberg, and other leading citizens. Dr. Alfred G. Heaney, an associate of Dr. Spohn, admitted the first patient to the facility, operated by Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word. After a hurricane damaged the structure on North Beach on September 14, 1919, Mrs. Henrietta King, widow of Capt. Richard King, founder of the King Ranch, donated five acres at this site for a new hospital. From a three-story brick building erected here in 1923, Spohn Hospital has grown into a modern medical complex. (1977)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Mirador de la Flor — 1.4 mi
  Corpus Christi's bayfront memorial to Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, the Tejano singer from this city, killed in 1995 at twenty-three, visited by about thirty thousand people a year.
• Art Museum of South Texas — 2.3 mi
  Philip Johnson's 1972 museum on the Corpus Christi bayfront, joined in 2006 by Ricardo Legorreta's Miller Wing, holding more than 2,000 works mostly from Texas and the Americas.
• Texas State Aquarium — 2.5 mi
  A nonprofit aquarium on the tip of Corpus Christi Beach built around the Gulf and the Caribbean, with the largest coastal wildlife rescue center in Texas behind the exhibits.
• USS Lexington Museum on the Bay — 2.6 mi
  An Essex-class carrier of 1943 moored off North Beach, the Blue Ghost that Tokyo Rose kept reporting sunk, and the Navy's training carrier for nearly three decades after.

More markers nearby

• First Methodist Church of Corpus Christi — 0.4 mi
• Camp Scurry — 0.6 mi
• Church of the Good Shepherd Episcopal — 0.6 mi
• Centennial Memorial Museum — 0.7 mi