Dr. F.F. Stone
Dr. F.F. Stone, an eye, ear, nose, and throat specialist, was among the first African Americans to practice medicine in Houston. In 1918, he and four other aspiring African-American physicians recognized the vital need for improved health care for the city’s black community. Houston’s white-controlled hospitals prohibited these men from practicing medicine at their facilities and limited African-American patients to only a few beds in segregated wards, assuming they even offered such limited services.
Dr. Stone and the other four black doctors combined their financial resources to build Houston’s first black hospital. Union Hospital, located in a house on the corner of Howard and Nash Streets, preceded the Houston Negro Hospital by nearly a decade. It consisted of six beds and one operating room. Dr. Stone became one of the hospital administrators.
Union Hospital soon became overcrowded, and Dr. Stone and the other physicians moved their facilities to a newly purchased building. They renamed their facility Union-Jeremiah Hospital.
The committed efforts of Dr. Stone and his colleagues to provide health care to the black population in Houston eventually caught the attention of oilman and Texaco founder Joseph S. Cullinan who contributed the funds for the Houston Negro Hospital. The city of Houston donated three acres of land. Dedicated in 1926, the Houston Negro Hospital (a three-story, fifty-bed facility) opened the following year.
Next Biography: Dr. and Mrs. John Stone and Family