A state cancer hospital established by law
In the first half of the twentieth century, many Texans had little access to specialist cancer care. Wealthier patients could seek treatment in places such as the northeastern United States, while rural and low-income residents had far fewer choices. Earlier legislative proposals for a cancer hospital had lacked funding, delaying its establishment.
On June 30, 1941, Governor W. Lee O’Daniel signed House Bill 268, creating a state cancer hospital and research division. The final appropriation was $500,000, and responsibility for its location, control, and management rested with the University of Texas Board of Regents. Its statutory tasks included diagnosis, treatment, research, teaching, and prevention, giving the hospital educational and scientific responsibilities from the outset.
Foundation support and the choice of Houston
Monroe Dunaway Anderson had accumulated his fortune in the cotton trade and arranged to continue his philanthropy through a foundation. After his death, its trustees planned a medical center in Houston. They offered to match the state’s $500,000 appropriation and provide temporary quarters and land for a permanent site, on condition that the hospital be located in Houston and named for Anderson.
The Board of Regents accepted the proposal in August 1942 and adopted the name M. D. Anderson Hospital for Cancer Research the following month. Houston physician Ernst Bertner became acting director. The first facilities occupied James Baker’s former estate, The Oaks, where the house and outbuildings were adapted for offices and research. Some personnel came from the university’s Medical Branch in Galveston, and work began in these temporary quarters.
Rented beds and the organization of care
The hospital began seeing patients in 1944 and leased twenty-two beds at Hermann Hospital. In 1946 it leased another six at the institution then known as Houston Negro Hospital. These rented beds made inpatient care possible before the permanent building was completed.
When Randolph Lee Clark became full-time director and surgeon-in-chief in 1946, the institution had only twenty-five full-time staff members. Clinics, administrative offices, and research staff still worked in temporary buildings. Clark recruited specialists, and by 1949 four major clinical departments—medicine, pathology, radiology, and surgery—were operating alongside basic science departments. The university supplied a framework for administration, while successive appointments built the hospital’s practical capacity.
Residents, conferences, and continuing education
Educational programs took shape during the 1940s. The hospital accepted its first resident in 1948, and predoctoral teaching in the basic sciences had begun by 1949. After the university established a postgraduate medical school for continuing education in 1947, Anderson staff also received teaching appointments there. These different arrangements for practitioners and degree students connected the hospital to the university’s educational network.
Teaching extended beyond students on site. Annual symposia and clinical conferences enabled professionals to exchange experience, and their papers appeared as books. By 1964, training covered nursing, pharmacy, medical social services, dietetics, and cancer registry operations and statistics. Courses, meetings, and publications turned departmental experience into material that could be discussed, organized, and taught.
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A permanent campus and team-based treatment
In March 1954, the forty-six patients in the temporary facilities moved to the new building in the Texas Medical Center. The permanent premises brought previously dispersed work together and accommodated expanding clinical and educational programs. Public funds and private gifts financed construction, continuing the two sources of support on which this state university institution relied.
The 1964 institutional report described an early commitment to team-based treatment: surgeons, radiotherapists, and internists held equal standing with distinct responsibilities, and physicists joined the team. It also specified free care for Texas residents unable to pay. Medical service, training, and public responsibility shaped the institution’s development; its adoption of the cancer center name in 1988 belonged to a later organizational phase.