Houston Infirmary

Among the plaque's relatives, Dr. Samuel Clark Red left the longest record. Born at Gay Hill in 1861, he was in 1885 the first student to receive a B.A. from the University of Texas, and he finished at Jefferson Medical College in 1887. In Houston he served as county physician, helped organize the Harris County Medical Society, supervised the city's first nurses' training school and introduced ambulance service. He was said to be the first in Houston to use the X ray, remove an appendix and give diphtheria antitoxin. He later led the Texas Medical Association.

What the plaque says

Houston Infirmary One of the most prominent hospital facilities established in Houston after the Civil War was the Houston Infirmary, founded in 1874 by two young physicians, Dr. David Finney Stuart and Dr. Joshua Larendon. These two former Confederate Army surgeons were soon joined in their practice by Dr. Thomas Joel Boyles. The infirmary played a prominent role in the organization of medical care for the many railroad companies that established operations in Houston during the 1870s and 1880s. Drs. Stuart, Larendon and Boyles operated the hospital for more than a decade before recruiting additional medical specialists to join the hospital staff. Three of the added physicians were relatives—Dr. James Boyles, a nephew of Dr. Thomas Boyles, joined the staff in 1885; Dr. Samuel Clark Red, a nephew of Dr. David Stuart, began work at the infirmary in 1887; and Dr. Joseph R. Stuart, son of Dr. David Stuart, began his career at the infirmary after completing medical school in 1890. The Houston Infirmary was first located on the north side of the Houston and Texas Central Railway tracks and west of Oliver St., but was relocated to a two-story frame building on the northwest corner of Washington Ave. and 10th (now Elder St.) In 1883. The segregated hospital contained a separate building for African American patients, and a ward for Hispanic patients was added by 1907. The establishment of a separate hospital for the Southern Pacific Railway in 1911 and the death of Dr. Joseph R. Stuart in 1913 contributed to the closure of the Houston Infirmary in 1913, after nearly forty years of service to the city of Houston. (2010)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society — 0.5 mi
  Ten historic buildings gathered in a downtown park below the skyscrapers, among them the 1870 house of the Reverend Jack Yates, built five years after emancipation.
• Emancipation Park — 2.1 mi
  The Third Ward park that freedpeople bought for Juneteenth in 1872, rebuilt in 2017 on Emancipation Avenue and still the center of the city's June 19 celebration.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 2.2 mi
  A museum in Houston's 1925 Light Guard Armory that tells the service of Black soldiers from the Revolutionary War onward, built from one veteran's thirty years of collecting.
• Rothko Chapel — 2.6 mi
  An octagonal chapel open to all faiths, built by the de Menils around fourteen dark canvases by Mark Rothko, with Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk standing in the pool outside.

More markers nearby

• Horace Dickinson Taylor — 0.3 mi
• Democratic National Convention, 1928 — 0.3 mi
• Thomas William House — 0.4 mi
• Edward Mandell House — 0.4 mi