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Event information:
Wednesday, Feb. 27, 2008
1-2 p.m.,
3715 Camp Bowie Blvd.
The Haskell Street side of the hospital, by the
Jennings Pavilion
 Watch a brief video of the farewell ceremony
OMCT Open date: 1946
OMCT Close
date: 2004
A brief OMCT history:
Founded in an old mansion on Summit
Avenue, the Osteopathic Medical Center of Texas (OMCT) was first called Fisher
Hospital, after Dr. Roy Fisher, whose family lived on the second floor. The
two-bed hospital soon grew to 12 beds, and it was incorporated as Fort Worth
Osteopathic Hospital (FWOH) in 1946 and was staffed by 13 physicians, including
Drs. George Luibel, Carl Everett and D.D. “Danny” Beyer. These same three
physicians also would begin the Texas College of Osteopathic Medicine (TCOM) in
1966 during off-hours from their professional practices. The hospital moved to
the 3600 block of Camp Bowie Boulevard in 1951, then to its current location in
1956. After nearly 50 years of caring for the Fort Worth Community, the OMCT
closed its doors for the last time in October 2004.
TCOM’s professional relationship:
Despite the concerns of
Dr. Phil Russell, chairman of the FWOH in 1970, about keeping the hospital
private, Dr. Everett (pictured at left) convinced Dr. Russell and other leaders
of FWOH to allow TCOM to rent the fifth floor, an unused shell, as the first
classroom space for the college. Although TCOM held classes in FWOH for only one
year, the professional relationship between the hospital and the college
continued, as many of TCOM’s students completed rotations, were residents and
later went to work there, as they did in hospitals across the state. When the
OMCT closed its doors in 2004, it seemed only natural that the land should be
used to expand the school which held its first classes inside its walls. In
February 2005, the University of North Texas Health Science Center signed an
agreement to purchase the 15.5 acres of property formerly belonging to the
OMCT.
The future of the Health Science Center:
A new building
erected near the corner of Camp Bowie Boulevard and Montgomery Street, on the
site of the former OMCT building, will provide the Health Science Center with
large auditorium space, smaller lecture halls, new patient-simulation labs, and
a state-of-the-art osteopathic manipulative medicine training facility. The
building is planned to be open by August 2009, when a larger class of TCOM
students than ever before will begin their training. Other buildings constructed
over the next 15 years on the OMCT site, as well as other properties owned by
the Health Science Center, will add an additional one million square feet of
classroom, lab and office space to the growing school.
Numbers of TCOM students:
First class of TCOM students:
20
Class of 2011: 173
Class of 2013: anticipated to be 205
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