technology; the desire to hold elected office within medical societies; and
the inclination to partner with others in the formation of a practical
corporation. Dr. Mayo’s sons continued this tradition and a scant decade
following the construction of their hospital, had established their operation
as the most advanced surgical enterprise in the world.
In 1906, Will Mayo was elected president of the American Medical
Association. The forty-five-year-old surgeon stated in his presidential
address that “the future will demand schools for the advanced training for
those who desire to do special work.” The Mayo Clinic School of
Medicine was not founded until 1972, but Dr. Will was not advocating for
a medical school. Instead, he was echoing surgical pioneers like William
Halsted, who foresaw the need to spend additional years of training in the
new specialties.
In the first decade of the new century, the Mayo emphasis on surgery
continued. Not only were the Mayo brothers single-mindedly identifying
as surgeons, the entire enterprise of the Mayo Clinic and Saint Marys
Hospital was as well. For anyone who has visited Rochester, even today, it
is hard to believe that it became one of the foremost medical complexes in
the world. Wouldn’t it be a guarantee that one of the East Coast port cities,
or even Chicago, would be the leading surgical mecca?
In some ways, it is easier to believe that it didn’t happen in a major
metropolitan center; there, the competition was so keen that no single
group of surgeons in those cities could commandeer a reliable cluster of
patients to become expert in a general area of surgery, saying nothing of
becoming a specialty surgeon. In Rochester, there was a “triumph of
cooperation” among the disciplined troops of the Mayo Clinic.^15 In his
commencement address in 1910 at Chicago’s Rush Medical College, Will
Mayo promoted multispecialty group practice, saying, “The sum-total of
medical knowledge is now so great ... that it would be futile for one man
to attempt to acquire ... a good working knowledge of any large part of the
whole. The very necessities of the case are driving practitioners into
cooperation. The best interest of the patient is the only interest to be
considered, and in order that the sick may have the benefit of advancing
knowledge, union of forces is necessary ... [so] it became necessary to
develop medicine as a cooperative science; the clinician, the specialist,
and the laboratory workers uniting for the good of the patient, each