John Durant, M.D., (right) founding director of the UAB Comprehensive Cancer Center, with Birmingham Mayor David Vann (left), 1977. Durant and the mayor inspect a linear accelerator in the new Radiation Therapy and Tumor Institute. The Institute opened in January 1977 as the first phase of the Lurleen B. Wallace Memorial Hospital and Tumor Institute.

Virgie Murphee, a student in the hospital’s radiology technology program, 1964. A technician education program was started in 1945 as a paraprofessional certificate course based in the radiology department of University Hospital. In 1966, the program was removed from the hospital to become a program in the new Division of Allied Health Sciences. Four years later, the division was reconstituted as UAB’s new community and allied health resource school, the predecessor of today’s School of Health Professions.

Robert Roth, M.D., in University Hospital, circa 1960. Roth was chair of the Department of Radiology from 1959-1985. The Department of Radiology was divided into two departments in 1969: Therapeutic Radiology and Diagnostic Radiology. Roth remained chair of the new therapeutic radiology department. He remained as chair when the department was renamed again in 1972 as the Department of Radiation Oncology.