WEEKEND EDITION / THURSDAY, NOV. 17, 2016 VOLUME 91 ISSUE 47
HOMETOWN HEALTH CARE Health Sciences Center vital to rural area medicine By MICHAEL CANTU News Editor
he townspeople of Amarillo and Post were still somewhat sore after it was announced Texas Technical College was to be established in Lubbock in 1923. People became a bit more irked once they put a medical school in the same town. During 1960s there came an argument in West Texas about the lack of doctors. For West Texas, at the time, there was one doctor for every 1,300 people, whereas a comfortable ratio is usually around one to 300. So, it was obvious West Texas, more specifically Lubbock, needed a medical school to attract more doctors. “So, as the argument came up at the state level, at the time, there were only two public schools in Texas, two public medical schools,” Dr. Tedd Mitchell, president of the Health Sciences Center, said. “Both of them were in the UT system.” There was the University of Texas medical branch in Galveston and the University of Texas Health Sciences Center Southwestern Medical Center, Mitchell said. The governor at the time, John Connally, had the idea of establishing another medical school at a UT institution in Houston that would generate a lot more doctors who would go to help in rural areas. It was Connally’s second in command, Lieutenant Governor Preston Smith, who had another idea for where to put the medical school, Mitchell said. “Preston Smith said, ‘No, it doesn’t work that way. You don’t have people growing up in East Texas and going down to Houston and then moving to Levelland,’” Mitchell said. “‘It doesn’t work that way. We need a school in West Texas.’”
SEE OVERVIEW, PG. 2
PHOTOS BY MAKENZIE HARRISON / THE DAILY TOREADOR
PG. 3
PG. 5
PG. 3
PROFESSORS DISCUSS RESEARCH INITIATIVES
MEDICAL CLINICS SERVE COMMUNITY
TECH SYSTEM LOOKS TO EXPAND WITH VET SCHOOL