performing an astonishing number of operations. Five years prior there
was no hospital in Rochester; in 1895, there were 762 operations,
including 95 intra-abdominal procedures.^11
At the turn of the century, fewer than 2 percent of American physicians
identified as surgeons,^12 but without apology, the Mayo brothers embraced
the identity of surgical operators. By 1905, a dozen doctors had been
added, all rallying around the Mayo surgeon-brothers. The greatest hire in
Mayo Clinic history, it may be argued, was that of a twenty-nine-year-old
physician who was also a Minnesota native.
In 1901, the Mayo brothers recruited Henry Plummer, a young man who
had worked with his physician-father in nearby Racine, Minnesota.
Plummer earned his medical degree from Northwestern in 1898, and had
trained under Frank Billings, a professor of medicine in Chicago, who was
a pioneering internist who had differentiated himself from the competition
with advanced laboratory and diagnostic equipment. Moreover, Billings
had predicted that the growing sophistication among physicians and
surgeons would drive the development of specialization in medicine. Not
coincidentally, it was Plummer who energized the growth of specialization
at the Mayo Clinic over the next several decades.
Like William Welch at Johns Hopkins, Plummer championed
bacteriology and laboratory medicine at Mayo. Whereas medicine had
been a primitive art just a half-century before, now at the turn of the
century, the small contingent of Rochester physicians and surgeons had a
custom-designed office space, exam rooms, a clinical laboratory, and an
X-ray machine.^13 In what sounds impossible, in 1903, Will and Charlie
performed 2,640 operations, including 1,302 intra-abdominal procedures.
“The number of patients who had died (sixty-nine) was remarkably low,
and 84% of those who had died had undergone abdominal operations,
acknowledged as a risky type of surgery.”^14 There were thousands of small
towns across America where groups of physicians had banded together on
Main Street, hoping to serve their little communities. Why was the group
in Rochester so radically successful in such a bewilderingly rapid fashion?
The achievement of establishing such dominance in a tiny town a long
train ride away from everywhere was hard fought, but not inexplicable.
The foundation for excellence was laid in the ambition of the father,
William Worrall Mayo. The recipe for success is there at the beginning:
the willingness to travel and be tutored by experts; the embrace of