HoustonChronicle.com - How the Baylor-Methodist 'love-affair' failed

HoustonChronicle.com - How the Baylor-Methodist 'love-affair' failed: "Divorce in the heart of Texas
How the great Baylor-Methodist love affair failed
Editor's note: For 50 years, it was a marriage of power and prestige, a relationship that nurtured superstar surgeons and groundbreaking research. Then it all fell apart. The Chronicle examines the disintegration of one of Houston's most storied relations
By TODD ACKERMAN
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle
GRAPHIC
� Baylor Clinic's revenue lags behind

One night last spring, Houston elite from Michael DeBakey to Jack Blanton to Paul Hobby sat down for dinner at the River Oaks home of Dr. Joseph Coselli.
Next to each attendee's plate of chicken piccata stood a table favor � a handpainted miniature ceramic lighthouse � whose symbolism was lost on no one. It would serve as a beacon of hope to guide Baylor College of Medicine and The Methodist Hospital through the turbulent waters swirling around them.
One by one, the roughly 25 people there stood and spoke about the looming crisis, the institutions' shared history and the heartfelt plea they should send to governing board members to not let it end.
'Baylor and Methodist are stronger together than they are apart,' said Blanton, a Houston civic leader and oilman who is on Methodist's board. 'The sum of the parts is greater than the individual pieces.'
Nine days later, on April 21, 2004, the individual pieces fell apart. After 54 years together � some the stuff of legend � the two venerable nonprofits parted ways, squabbling, suspicious and, finally, unable to reach an agreement to extend the partnership in which Methodist served as one of Baylor's primary teaching hospitals. In the history of U.S. academic medicine, say historians, such a split has never occurred."