DUANE
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Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Now, some names get carved into the stone of a place so deep that the place itself carries the name forward, long after the man is gone. Raleigh R.
White, Jr., was one of those men. Born in 1871, he was a Mississippi native, but Texas had his number early. He moved here in 1882, and this state had a way of keeping the people it wanted.
White went on to earn his degree from the Tulane University Department of Medicine in 1893. Now, that is not a small thing. That is a man who put in the work, who showed up, who earned his place in a room full of serious people doing serious things.
Then, in 1895, a door opened. Dr. A.
C. Scott hired him as house physician for the Santa Fe Railway Hospital right there in Temple. You stop and think about what that job meant.
A railway hospital. The frontier of medicine meeting the frontier of transportation. White stepped through that door.
And what happened next is the kind of thing that starts with a handshake and ends with a legacy. White and Scott formed a medical practice partnership. They became joint chief surgeons for the railway.
And together, those two men established what is now known as Scott and White Hospital. His colleagues esteemed him. His patients esteemed him.
Dr. Raleigh R. White, Jr., died in 1917, but the institution he helped build is still standing in Temple, still carrying both their names.
Some partnerships, friend, they just refuse to end.
What the marker says
(1871-1917) Mississippi native Raleigh R. White, Jr., moved to Texas in 1882. A graduate of Tulane University Department of Medicine in 1893, White was hired by Dr. A. C. Scott as house physician for the Santa Fe Railway Hospital in Temple in 1895. White and Scott formed a medical practice partnership, became joint chief surgeons for the railway, and established what is now Scott & White Hospital. Dr. White was highly esteemed by both colleagues and patients. Recorded - 1997