Site of McAllen Hospitals
McAllen, Hidalgo County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The city of McAllen was founded in 1904 and incorporated in 1911. The first medical practitioner was Dr. J.B.F. McMillan who arrived in 1906. Dr. Frank E. Osborn built a two story building in 1918 with a pharmacy on the first floor and doctor's offices upstairs. Dr. Carlos Balli, the first Hispanic to open a practice in McAllen, began in 1920 and was noted for making house calls on horseback. A hospital building was erected in 1920. Dr. J. M. Doss combined his home with an office and hospital. The two-story structure featured a solarium on both ends of the ground floor, with a surgical facility and hospital beds on the upper floor. In 1925 the first municipal hospital was built on South Broadway with beds for 25 patients, but was soon outgrown. A new hospital here on Main Street was completed in 1928. The two buildings were connected with a covered passageway. Increased population caused an addition to be built in 1954. More growth and medical advances demanded new additions in 1960, 1967 and 1973. Demolished in 1993, the hospital building that stood here for decades was a significant part of the development of health care in McAllen. Other medical facilities have been added to meet the needs of the area. (1996)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
McAllen's first doctor arrived in 1906, and over the following decades a series of physicians built the town's medical infrastructure—among them Dr. Carlos Balli, the first Hispanic to practice here, known for making house calls on horseback. Private clinics gave way to the first municipal hospital in 1925 and a larger facility on Main Street in 1928, expanded repeatedly through the mid-twentieth century as the population grew. The long-serving hospital building on this site was demolished in 1993.
Why it matters
The site charts the growth of modern health care in the Rio Grande Valley, reflecting how quickly a frontier border town built the institutions of a full-fledged city.
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Related people
- · Carlos Balli
- · Frank E. Osborn
- · J. M. Doss
Themes & tags
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