Mayo Clinic

Home > Medicine > Divisions, Diagnostics, and Procedures > Medicine

Mayo Clinic, innovative medical center in Rochester, Minnesota.In 1863, an English‐born, nomadic country doctor, William Worrall Mayo, moved his wife, three daughters, and infant son, William James Mayo, to the frontier town of Rochester (pop. 3,000), where a second son, Charles Horace Mayo, was born in 1865. The unwillingness of W.W. Mayo's wife to move again compelled the restless doctor to remain in Rochester. When a tornado devastated the town in 1883, the local sisters of the Order of St. Francis offered to build a hospital there if Dr. Mayo and his two physician sons, affectionately known as Drs. Will and Charlie, would staff it. Saint Mary's, the first general hospital in southeastern Minnesota, opened in 1889. Drs. Will and Charlie tirelessly traveled throughout Europe and the United States to learn the newest surgical techniques, and soon their reputation for expert diagnoses and safe surgery lured physicians from around the world to Rochester to watch the brothers perform. In 1892, the Mayos began inviting other doctors to join their practice. Among the first was Dr. Henry Plummer, whose vision of a private, coordinated, multispecialty group practice of medicine dedicated to patient care became the core of the Mayo Clinic philosophy. The Mayo Graduate School of Medicine, the world's first formal program to train medical specialists, opened in 1915 with an endowment from the Mayo brothers. In 1919, the Mayos turned over their personal assets to form what is now the Mayo Foundation; the partnerships were dissolved and the entire staff became salaried. The Mayo Medical School was started in 1972. The Mayo Foundation opened its first “satellite” Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1986 and its second in Scottsdale, Arizona, in 1987.

Mayo milestones include sharing the Nobel Prize for the discovery of cortisone, creation of a system to grade different types of cancer, development of the first effective tuberculosis treatment, performing the first hip replacement, pioneering open‐heart surgery, and pivotal work in the development of successful organ transplantation.
See also Health and Fitness; Health Maintenance Organizations; Heart Disease; Hospitals; Medical Education; Medicine: From the 1870s to 1945; Medicine: Since 1945.

Bibliography

Helen Clapesattle , The Doctors Mayo, 1990.
C.D.B. Bryan , The Mayo Clinic, 1999.

C.D.B. Bryan

Mayo Clinic see Mayo, Charles Horace .