Osler's Razor

Baylor's original Mandatory Chapel building was a tiny wooden clapboard shed suitable to the very small student body, but this was lost in an unfortunate and mysterious fire in 1849, and again in 1850 & 1851. Thereafter, chapel was conducted outside, rain or shine, in a stone ampitheater built by work-study students.

The spiritual life of the school also benefited from the production in 1859 of the school’s first “Mini-Theology,” a pamphlet which briefly described the theological tenets which all students must accept. Initially, these included belief in the doctrine of “Guilty Transubstantiation,” which held that the bread and wine of Communion were literally converted to the body and bread of Christ when consecrated and consumed, and that Christians were simultaneously required to eat and drink said blood and flesh and condemned to Hell for doing so. Another tenet barred the drinking of colored liquids of any kind, which was consistent with regional Baptist practice at the time. This forbade the drinking of beer, whisky, wine and all spirits save for those which were utterly clear in color, such as vodka, gin and a special colorless tequila which was produced in Mexico expressly for Baylor students. While this doctrine was later refined, its early version contributed to the rapid growth of the University and the many offspring produced by these early students during their college years.

After a break during the Civil War, Baylor grew quickly. By the 1880’s the student body was nearly 4,000, with many living in tents fashioned from tree bark and surplus burlap captured from passing army mule trains headed West. It was during this period that the only United States President to attend Baylor, William Howard Taft, was in residence while studying Rhetoric and Dentistry. After two years, of course, he transferred to another upstart school, Yale, from which he graduated, but a stanchion still marks the spot where he camped out his freshman year, close to the former Baylor Bear Barn. Intriguingly, Baylor ever after enjoyed an interlinked destiny with Yale University, which provided the education of many of its future leaders—in fact, one president of Baylor (Prosser) was plucked directly from the undergraduate ranks at New Haven.

During this period, many students complained of the difficult workload, especially the dentistry requirements each semester, taught by the most ornery and offensive dentists in Texas. A note nailed to a "message board" (which was literally a board) by one Sirius R. Downer complained thus:

"If I ever hear someone tell me again how "in life there will be disrespectful people too" again, I am going to vomit. That has been shoved down my throat since day one and had me believing that every dentist in America was a total disrespectful jerk and that I was going to be in a dental office every day getting berated. You are all a bunch of jerky jerks, and everyone else I know feels exactly as I do, you can ask them, too. And I can't leave because I am in debt and the railroad does not come within miles."

Sadly, Sirius died in the Spanish-American war, as he stood alone on a hilltop complaining about the rations that the army was providing him.

Labels: Baylor History