Dallas County Medical Society Alliance Foundation
Dallas, Dallas County, Texas
Marker Inscription
On May 4, 1917, a group of 17 doctors’ wives met to discuss a proposal by Mrs. John O. McReynolds to form a woman’s auxiliary to the Dallas County Medical Society – the first group of its kind in the country. With the nation’s entry into WWI and increasing needs of the Red cross, Mrs. McReynolds saw that there were many opportunities for year-round volunteering including promoting better hygiene, nutrition and home safety. Their work inspired the formation of auxiliaries in McLennan and Bexar counties that same year. The three counties met on May 15, 1918, to form an auxiliary to the Texas Medical Association, with Mrs. Edward H. Cary of Dallas serving as the first president. When the American Medical Association met on May 24, 1922, Dr. Edward H. Cary proposed a resolution to form the woman’s auxiliary to the AMA, which was approved. Mrs. McReynolds was elected President of the national auxiliary in 1927. The Dallas County Auxiliary focused on children and improvements to medical facilities in the area. A cottage was built at Savage Lake and donated to the Salvation Army for housing underprivileged children during the summer. Throughout the fifties, the auxiliary’s efforts went to community health and education. In 1954, in response to the nursing shortage, the Edith Cavell Nursing Scholarship Fund was established. In 1973, the national organization revised its bylaws to allow the membership of male spouses. In November 1974, the family of Rena Munger and George N. Aldredge finalized the donation of Aldredge House, built in 1917, to the auxiliary. In 2003, the local organization’s name was changed to the Dallas County Medical Society Alliance Foundation.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In 1917, seventeen doctors' wives met in Dallas to form what is described as the nation's first auxiliary to a county medical society, channeling wartime and civic energy into public health work. The group promoted hygiene, nutrition, and safety, inspired sister organizations across Texas, and grew into a national movement within the American Medical Association. Over the decades it funded nursing scholarships, children's welfare, and medical facilities, and acquired the historic Aldredge House as its home.
Why it matters
The organization shows how women turned volunteer networks into lasting public-health institutions, a pioneering model of women's civic leadership in early twentieth-century medicine.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the spring of 1917, Dallas was a fast-growing Texas city with big-city ambitions, and the country around it was tipping into a moment of enormous mobilization. The United States entered World War I that April, and within weeks ordinary civic life reorganized itself around the war effort — Red Cross drives, food and fuel conservation, and volunteer service became the texture of daily life, especially for women whose formal public roles were still sharply limited.
This was also the height of the Progressive Era, when Americans came to believe that organized, scientific attention to public health could remake a community. Clean water, better nutrition, safe homes, and the control of infectious disease were the great civic causes of the day. Doctors were central figures in that project, and the women closest to them — their wives — were expected to run households and charities but rarely to hold institutional power of their own.
Into that gap stepped a group of Dallas women who saw an opportunity that no one else had quite formalized. Meeting on May 4, 1917, seventeen doctors' wives gathered to consider whether they might build something lasting out of the volunteer energy the war had unleashed — not a temporary relief committee, but a permanent auxiliary tied to the county's organized medicine.
People & events
The idea belonged to Mrs. John O. McReynolds, who proposed that the small circle form a woman's auxiliary to the Dallas County Medical Society. She understood that wartime need — the demands of the Red Cross, the push for better hygiene, nutrition, and home safety — was not a one-season emergency but a year-round opening for organized volunteering. What she launched is remembered as the first group of its kind in the country.
The model spread with striking speed. That same year, women in McLennan and Bexar counties formed auxiliaries of their own, inspired by the Dallas example. On May 15, 1918, the three counties came together to create an auxiliary to the Texas Medical Association, and Mrs. Edward H. Cary of Dallas was chosen as its first president — a Texas-wide organization built, in barely a year, from a single evening's meeting.
The momentum reached the national stage. When the American Medical Association met on May 24, 1922, Dr. Edward H. Cary proposed a resolution to establish a woman's auxiliary to the AMA, and it was approved. Five years later, in 1927, Mrs. McReynolds — the woman who had first floated the notion in a Dallas parlor — was elected president of that national auxiliary, closing the circle on an idea that had grown from local to nationwide in a decade.
Its place in the American story
The story of this organization is a small, clear window onto how American women built institutional power in an age that offered them few official channels. Denied easy access to boardrooms, offices, and the vote for much of this period, women turned the one resource they had in abundance — organized volunteer networks — into durable public-health machinery that outlasted any single campaign.
What began as an auxiliary to a county medical society became a national movement embedded in the AMA itself, and its work bent toward the concrete needs of ordinary people. Over the decades it funded children's welfare, improvements to medical facilities, and community health education. In 1954, answering a nationwide nursing shortage, it established the Edith Cavell Nursing Scholarship Fund — named for a figure long honored for wartime nursing sacrifice — channeling women's philanthropy directly into the training of the next generation of caregivers.
The organization also mirrored the country's slow shifts in gender roles. In 1973 the national body revised its bylaws to admit male spouses, quietly acknowledging that the world of physicians — and of their partners — no longer looked as it had in 1917. From first-in-the-nation auxiliary to a foundation that took its modern name in 2003, it traces the long arc of women's civic leadership in American medicine.
If you visit
The organization's home is Aldredge House, a residence built in 1917 — the very year those seventeen women first met — and finalized as a gift to the auxiliary in November 1974 by the family of Rena Munger and George N. Aldredge. Standing before it, you're looking at a building exactly as old as the movement it now shelters, a coincidence of dates that gives the place a quiet symmetry.
This is a spot for travelers who like their history human-scaled. There are no battlefields or dramatic ruins here — instead there's the more subtle pleasure of standing where a genuinely original idea took root and then rippled outward across Texas and the nation. If you slow down and picture that first gathering, the marker rewards the imagination.
Work it into a broader Dallas history outing. The city has plenty of grander landmarks, but this one pairs especially well with any itinerary built around women's history, the Progressive Era, or the roots of American public health. Read the marker, take in the house's early-twentieth-century lines, and consider how much can grow from a single meeting of seventeen determined people.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Mrs. John O. McReynolds
- · Mrs. Edward H. Cary
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Alexander Mansion
Dallas, TX
Built in 1906 for $125,000 on what was then the far edge of Dallas, the Alexander Mansion was a showpiece of the city's early twentieth-century high society, hosting glittering social gatherings for businessman C.H. Alexander. In 1930 it was acquired by the Dallas Woman's Forum, a women's civic and cultural club, which restored and preserved the grand house. Recognized as a Recorded Texas Historical Landmark in 1968, it endures as a monument to a gracious era.
East Dallas Christian Church
Dallas, TX
Members of Central Christian Church organized this fellowship in 1903, first meeting in a wooden chapel and moving to this donated site in 1907 before erecting a brick building in 1912. Under its first pastor, the Rev. John Stevens, and later leaders, the church became a force in the growth of east Dallas, backing neighborhood programs and missions — including the Juliette Fowler Home, launched by member Sara Harwood.
Texas Women in the Civil War, A Tribute to
Dallas, TX
With some 90,000 Texas men away fighting for the Confederacy, the civilian labor of a whole society fell to the women left behind in a land of few factories and a tightening naval blockade. They ran farms, businesses, and newspapers; loaded shells and made gun caps; spun, wove, and dyed homemade cloth; brewed coffee from acorns and medicine from herbs; and faced raids and marauders along thousands of miles of coast and frontier.
Near Homesite of Belle Boyd
Dallas, TX
Marie Isabella "Belle" Boyd became one of the Confederacy's most celebrated spies, beginning her career at just seventeen when she reportedly shot a Union soldier who had threatened her mother. Charming Federal officers into revealing secrets that reached Confederate hands, she endured several imprisonments and eventual exile before reinventing herself as a lecturer and dramatic reader. In the 1880s she lived in a stately mansion near this Dallas site with her third husband before selling the house in 1887.