FOURTEEN
Medical Industrial Complex and Medical
Devices
In the decades following the Civil War, the western expansion of railroads
connected forests, farmlands, oil production facilities, and ports across the
continent, enriching industrialists like J. P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt,
and Jay Gould, and spurring the growth of interior American cities. While
oil production was relatively modest prior to 1901, the discovery of major
oil deposits in the Midwest transformed the petroleum industry from a
light and lubricant enterprise into a fuel production business. Houston,
Texas, had grown from a small western outpost to a major port with the
development of rail networks and deep-water shipping channels to the sea.
At the beginning of the 20th century, and less than a century after its
founding, Houston had become an important transportation center, and its
banks, “fat on the profits of oil, cotton, and lumber enterprises, were
solvent and able to assist business ventures with much needed loans.”^1
Two pairs of brothers decided to move their cotton trading business,
Anderson, Clayton and Company, from Oklahoma City, hoping to strike it
rich in the burgeoning southeast Texas town. The company, founded by
Monroe and Frank Anderson with Frank’s brother-in-law Will Clayton
(and later, Ben Clayton), had enjoyed a measure of success since it began
in 1904.
Only five years old when his father died, Monroe Anderson had lived in
Jackson, Tennessee, his entire life. With essentially no college education,
Monroe gained commonsense banking knowledge from his years as a bank
cashier in Jackson, and after a few years of remotely managing the books
of Anderson, Clayton, decided to move to Houston in 1907. While the firm
would not relocate their headquarters there until 1916, Monroe became a