James "Red" Duke

On August 25, 2015, it was reported that Duke had died at Memorial Hermann Hospital in Houston from natural causes. He was 86 years old.

Dr. Red Duke Elementary School in the Alvin Independent School District opened in 2014 was named after Duke.

The Texas Cowboy Hall of Fame inducted Duke in 2010.

Duke was a founding member of the American Trauma Society and was an Advanced Trauma Life Support instructor for the American College of Surgeons. He was named Surgeon of the Year by the James F. Mitchell Foundation in 1988. Duke's efforts to educate the public in health issues and tireless work as a crusader against trauma brought him into serious consideration for the position of Surgeon General of the United States in 1989.

After returning from Afghanistan, Duke joined the faculty of the University of Texas Medical School at Houston, where he was a professor of surgery. Among his many responsibilities, Duke served as special assistant to the president of the UT Health Science Center and held one of the distinguished professorships at the UT Medical School as the John B. Holmes Professor of Clinical Sciences. He established Houston's Hermann Hospital Life Flight operations in 1976 and helped establish its trauma and emergency services, of which he served as director.

Duke's academic career began in 1966 as an assistant professor of surgery at UT Southwestern Medical School and later at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York. He also took some time to pursue graduate studies in chemical engineering, biochemistry and computer sciences at Columbia University under the auspices of an NIH Special Fellowship. While Duke was an assistant professor of surgery in New York, he spent two years from 1970 to 1972 in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, as a visiting professor and later chairman of surgery at Nangarhar University School of Medicine.

Duke completed his internship in internal medicine and his residency in general surgery at Dallas' Parkland Memorial Hospital in 1965. During his residency, Duke was the first surgeon to receive President John F. Kennedy at Parkland after he was shot in Dallas in 1963, then attended to the wounds of then Texas Governor John Connally.

He served a two-year tour of duty as a tank officer in the 2nd Armored Division of the U.S. Army and then earned a divinity degree from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1955. After reading a book by Albert Schweitzer, he changed vocations to medicine and enrolled in the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas, from which he received his M.D. in 1960.

Duke was born in Ennis, Texas. He graduated from Hillsboro High School and later earned a Bachelor of Science degree from Texas A&M University in 1950. He served as a yell leader at Texas A&M and was the first person to deliver the poem "The Last Corps Trip" publicly.

James Henry "Red" Duke, Jr. (November 16, 1928 – August 25, 2015) was a trauma surgeon and professor at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston and Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center, where he worked on-site since 1972. He was instrumental in introducing Memorial Hermann's Life Flight program and bringing a level I trauma center to Houston.