Much of Eastland County's medical history is tied to brothers George Blackwell and Edward Blackwell, who studied medicine at Baylor Medical College and Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago, returned to Eastland County after receiving their degrees in 1907, and later married sisters Frankie Brogdon and Bessie. Both served in the U.S. Army Medical Corps during World War I. After the war, they opened the Blackwell Clinic in downtown Gorman and, recognizing the need for patient care facilities, built Blackwell Sanitarium at this site in 1919, later known as Blackwell Hospital. Frankie and Bessie prepared meals there, using livestock kept by the facility for meat, eggs, milk, and butter, while nurses handled medical service as well as housekeeping, and the brothers treated patients at both the clinic and the hospital. As two large oilfields began attracting many new residents to the area around the time the hospital opened, the hospital expanded to meet demand. The brothers eventually moved their clinic into the hospital, began to specialize, and added physicians to the staff, including Dr. David V. Rodgers, George Blackwell's son-in-law, who joined in 1938 and took over hospital leadership in the late 1950s. In 1971, administrators completed a larger building elsewhere, and the old Blackwell Hospital building, which had grown into a four-story brick structure with doctor and dental offices, a clinic, and a laboratory, stood vacant until it was demolished in 1989.