University of the Incarnate Word: From Epidemic to Education

In the summer of eighteen sixty-nine, three French nuns arrived in San Antonio carrying little more than their habits and a commission from the Catholic bishop of Texas. Bishop Claude Dubuis had written to their order in Lyon with unusual frankness: the people of San Antonio were dying of cholera, he wrote, and he needed women willing to nurse the sick and build a hospital in a frontier city that had almost nothing. The Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word came.

They built the Santa Rosa Infirmary, the first hospital in San Antonio, treating patients of every background through the epidemic and after. Within a decade they had begun to think about education. The Sisters recognized that the girls of San Antonio, particularly those from poor and working families, had no access to serious schooling. In eighteen eighty-one, they received a state charter as a Catholic college for women, one of the first institutions in Texas empowered to confer baccalaureate degrees.

The college moved in eighteen ninety-seven to a property purchased from the estate of George W. Brackenridge, a two-hundred-thirty-acre tract at the headwaters of the San Antonio River, adjacent to what would become Brackenridge Park. The spring-fed San Antonio River rises from the ground on the campus to this day. The institution was renamed the College and Academy of the Incarnate Word in nineteen nine and affiliated with Catholic University of America in nineteen twelve.

Over the twentieth century it grew from a women's college into a co-educational university, reaching full university status as the University of the Incarnate Word. It now enrolls more than nine thousand students across its San Antonio campus and several international locations. The Sisters' original mission, to serve communities with few other options, remains the institution's stated identity, from the cholera wards of eighteen sixty-nine to the classrooms above the headwaters of the river today.