Case of the Missing Hospital

The people of Houston went to the polls last week and used their ballots to cure a strange malady--a perennial case of "one of our hospitals is missing." Beginning ten years ago, to care for the needy ill of the mushrooming oil-rich city and surrounding Harris County, $12 million was set aside. It was plain that Jefferson Davis Hospital was hopelessly inadequate. Overcrowding was rated a major factor this year in the deaths of 18 babies in a staphylococcus epidemic (TIME. March 31). Still no hospital was in sight.

Reason for the delay: like many another city with an influential medical school and affiliated "teaching hospitals." Houston was rent by town-v.-gown dissent. Speaking for the gown, Baylor University and the burgeoning Texas Medical Center (130 acres. 1,750 beds), wanted the new Jefferson Davis built as part of the center. This, they insisted, is for patients' good as well as for doctors' convenience, and it is increasingly common practice in the better U.S. medical centers. The gown's view was supported by a majority of city councilors and county commissioners.

In bitter opposition, for the town, stood a majority of the Harris County Medical Society and its top officers. Mostly family doctors and general surgeons, they resented being frozen out of hospital staffs. were especially incensed at not being allowed to do even straightforward surgery in teaching hospitals. The county society demanded that the new Jefferson Davis rise on the hospital's present downtown site (on Buffalo Drive, four miles from the Medical Center), that the society should partly staff it and get one-third of the seats on its board. Result: every time Baylor University and the city fathers got set to start a new hospital in the Medical Center, the county society blocked the move. Last month, flexing its muscles, the society forced a city referendum on the issue. At week's end the voters ruled. 40,600 to 37,900 for the Medical Center site.

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