Enduring Legacy: The M. D. Anderson Foundation and the Texas Medical Center by William Henry Kellar (review)

When people think of the Houston economy, refineries, NASA, and the ship channel often come to mind. Yet the city’s largest employer is the Texas Medical Center, which has been at the forefront of medical breakthroughs for more than a half a century. In this well-researched book, William Henry Kellar tells the story of both this world-class “city of health” and the foundation that acted as its catalyst. Kellar is well known for his work at the Center for Public History at the University of Houston and his earlier work, Make Haste Slowly: Moderates, Conservatives, and School Desegregation in Houston (Texas A&M University Press, 1999). In this new work he once more expands the knowledge of his hometown.

Because of the dual mission of telling the story of both the M. D. Anderson Foundation and the Texas Medical Center (TMC), Kellar provides a thorough background discussion of both the city and its medical history. He weaves a tale of pragmatic, successful businessmen who become philanthropic, community leaders. Early chapters include short biographical sketches on many of the early business, legal and medical leaders in Houston. In particular, the four brothers who started Anderson, Clayton and Company (Frank and M. D. Anderson and Will and Benjamin Clayton) loom large throughout the first half of the book as the business, and later the foundation, begins. The book shifts after Anderson dies and the foundation helps create the TMC. Particularly interesting are the stories of the creation of the Cancer Hospital and how it came to Houston (not Austin or Galveston), and the luring of the Baylor College of Medicine away from Dallas. In an easy to follow chronological narrative, Kellar brings each of the entities into the TMC; without the boosterism of many local citizens, such as Hugh Roy Cullen, J. S. Cullinan II, and Gus Wortham, to expand on the largess of the M. D. Anderson Foundation, the visionary medical facility would never have come to fruition. The book ends with an update on the foundation and its many gifts; from an original corpus of $19 million, it has grown to more than $100 million today and has given out grants in excess of $276 million. The largest benefactor has been the TMC.

While the story is entertaining, perhaps more important is Kellar’s outstanding scholarship and his use of primary sources. He has meticulously scoured the area for sources, including the M. D. Anderson Foundation records, the McGovern Historical Collections, as well as local universities and libraries. In addition, he interviewed more than twenty participants over more than a decade. He also used nearly thirty other oral histories that had been recorded as early as 1970.

Without question, Enduring Legacy is an important addition to the growing historical material on Houston and Texas. At times the book can be a bit repetitious because of the overlapping of the foundation, the TMC, and the many member institutions, but that does not detract from its importance. Because of the research and the narrative anyone interested in the history of Houston, or of medicine, should buy this book for their collection.