In 1891, when 80 percent of Texas doctors had less than a year of formal medical training, Galveston built an answer: the University of Texas Medical Branch, the state's first medical school, opening with 23 students in one building designed by local architect Nicholas J. Clayton. That building — Old Red, a Romanesque Revival structure in red brick and sandstone — took six feet of water from the 1900 hurricane, the deadliest natural disaster in American history, and stood. It took six feet again from Hurricane Ike in 2008, and stood. When the gambling halls that made Galveston the Gulf's sin city closed in the 1950s and businesses relocated to the mainland, the medical school stayed. UTMB grew to more than 70 buildings and 2,500 students. Old Red is still there, still the oldest surviving medical school building in Texas. Go see it.
