FLEWELLEN, ROBERT TURNER (1821-1899). Robert Turner Flewellen, Texas legislator and professor of medicine, son of James and Elizabeth (Parson) Flewellen, was born in October 1821 in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. After his father died in 1829 his mother moved to Culloden, Georgia, where Flewellen attended school. He read medicine in a private office, then attended a course of lectures in the Medical College of Charleston, South Carolina, and one in the medical department of the University of New York, from which he graduated in 1845. He married Carrie Bivins in 1848. She died in 1854, and in 1860 Flewellen married Eugenia Andrews.
He moved from Georgia to California in 1850 and to Washington County, Texas, in 1853. He served two terms in the legislature from Washington County and one term from Harris County. He introduced and secured passage of legislation chartering a medical college in Texas and advocated a high standard of professional ethics and protection by law of the practice of medicine. He was professor of anatomy and a trustee of Texas Medical College in Galveston. In 1870 Flewellen became a charter member of the Texas Historical Society, and in 1872 he was elected president of the Texas State Medical Association (later the Texas Medical Associationqv). He died in January 1899.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Lewis E. Daniell, Types of Successful Men in Texas (Austin: Von Boeckmann, 1890). Ralph W. Jones, "The First Roots of the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston," Southwestern Historical Quarterly 65 (April 1962). George Plunkett [Mrs. S. C.] Red, The Medicine Man in Texas (Houston, 1930).
