Raleigh R. White, Jr., M.D.

White's Handbook biography is a story of money he did not have. His father was a Baptist circuit rider, and the family farmed near Lockhart; when drought destroyed his first cotton crop, White resolved to get an education. He paid his way through Baylor by working in a livery stable, and finished his Tulane medical course while working at the New Orleans Cotton Exchange. In 1895 he passed Scott's competitive examination for house surgeon. At the Texas Surgical Society's founding he introduced a resolution condemning fee splitting. A heart attack killed him in 1917.

What the plaque says

Raleigh R. White, Jr., M.D. Born December 10, 1871, in Tippah County, Mississippi, Raleigh R. White, Jr., was the son of the Rev. Raleigh White, Sr., and Anna Davidson White. The Rev. Mr. White had trained as a physician, but became a Baptist minister who served a number of Texas churches after moving his family to Texas in 1882. Raleigh White, Jr., attended Baylor University and graduated from Tulane University Department of Medicine in 1893 at the age of 21. White practiced medicine in Cameron for about eighteen months before moving to Temple in 1895 when Dr. Arthur C. Scott hired him to serve as house physician at the Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe Railway Hospital. Doctors Scott and White formed a medical practice partnership, and were named joint Chief Surgeons of the Santa Fe Railway in 1897. Their practice flourished, and in 1904 they established their own hospital named the Temple Sanitarium, now Scott & White Hospital. Dr. White, a gifted business partner and renowned surgeon, developed a treatment for cancer an actively promoted ethical and humane treatment of patients. Active in a number of medical associations, White contributed greatly to medicine in Texas until his early death in 1917 at age 45. (1997)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Temple Railroad and Heritage Museum — 1.6 mi
  The Santa Fe depot of 1911 in a railroad town that began in 1880 as a construction camp, now a museum with locomotives and cars parked beside the active rail yard.
• Mother Neff State Park — 19 mi
  A Leon River park that grew from six acres Isabella Neff left the state in her 1921 will, where Civilian Conservation Corps Company 817 built a stone tower, a pavilion and roads in the 1930s.
• Milam County Courthouse and Jail — 28 mi
  Cameron's 1892 Renaissance Revival courthouse and the 1895 St. Louis-built jail beside it, now the county museum, are listed together on the National Register.

More markers nearby

• George Valter Brindley, Sr., M.D. — steps away
• Arthur Carroll Scott, Sr., M.D. — steps away
• Scott & White Hospital — steps away
• Former Site of Scott & White School of Nursing — steps away