Alexander Wray Ewing: Pioneer Texas Doctor and Surgeon General (1809–1853)
By: Robert Wooster
Published: 1952
Updated: October 14, 2025
Alexander Wray Ewing, early Texas doctor, was born in 1809 in Londonderry, Ireland. He studied medicine at Trinity College, Dublin, and at the College of Surgeons in Edinburgh. He moved to Pennsylvania and in 1834 to Texas. He lived briefly at San Felipe and acquired a quarter league now in Fayette County in 1835. He was appointed surgeon general of the Texas army on April 6, 1836, and treated Sam Houston's wound at the battle of San Jacinto. Ewing incurred President David G. Burnet's wrath by accompanying the wounded Houston to Galveston. He was dismissed by Burnet but was soon reinstated. The Texas Congress blocked President Houston's move to keep Ewing as chief medical officer in 1837, and he was succeeded in this post by Ashbel Smith. Ewing moved to Houston, where he became first president of that city's Medical and Surgical Society in 1838. He also was a member of a "committee of arrangements" for the proposed Houston and Brazos Rail Road Company. By 1842 Ewing was again serving in the army. He was married twice in ten years-to Louisa Henrietta Smiley Reid, who died in 1842, to Elizabeth E. (Graham) Tompkins, who died in 1904. Ewing had at least two children, and by 1850 owned real property valued at $6,000. He was a Mason. He died on November 1, 1853, and was buried at Founders Memorial Park.
Bibliography:
Sam Houston Dixon and Louis Wiltz Kemp, The Heroes of San Jacinto (Houston: Anson Jones, 1932). Telegraph and Texas Register (Houston), October 16, 1844. Houston Weekly Telegraph, November 11, 1853. Pat Ireland Nixon, The Medical Story of Early Texas, 1528–1853 (Lancaster, Pennsylvania: Lupe Memorial Fund, 1946). Andrew Forest Muir, "Augustus M. Tomkins, Frontier Prosecutor," Southwestern Historical Quarterly Volume 54 (July 1950).
Categories:
Time Periods:
Places:
The following, adapted from the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition, is the preferred citation for this entry.
Robert Wooster, “Ewing, Alexander Wray,” Handbook of Texas Online, accessed March 09, 2026, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/ewing-alexander-wray.
Published by the Texas State Historical Association.
TID:
FEW01
All copyrighted materials included within the Handbook of Texas Online are in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107 related to Copyright and “Fair Use” for Non-Profit educational institutions, which permits the Texas State Historical Association (TSHA), to utilize copyrighted materials to further scholarship, education, and inform the public. The TSHA makes every effort to conform to the principles of fair use and to comply with copyright law.
For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml
If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
- 1952
- October 14, 2025
This entry belongs to the following special projects:
