On August 21, 1883, a cataclysmic tornado ripped through the tiny town
of Rochester, Minnesota. The F5 tornado (winds greater than 260 miles
per hour^7 ) resulted in the deaths of thirty-seven and over two hundred
serious injuries. The town of Rochester was a typical Midwestern farming
community that had just become home to some twenty-four Franciscan
Sisters six years earlier who had come to Rochester to establish a new
congregation and to serve as teachers in the small southern Minnesota
settlement. The cyclone devastated the town and highlighted the complete
lack of emergency medical care. The town was fortunate to be served by
an enterprising general practitioner—an immigrant from Lancashire,
England, who had held more than a dozen job titles in his life, including
newspaperman, riverboat captain, farmer, tailor, politician, and census
taker, but as Rochester grew, his role as community physician became his
identity. William Worrall Mayo (1819–1911) was a town father, but made
his most important contribution to Rochester (and the world) in the rearing
of his two sons, William James Mayo and Charles Horace Mayo.
Dr. Mayo and his wife Louise married when he was thirty-two years old,
but Will Mayo wasn’t born for another decade, when his father was forty-
two. (Charles was born four years later.) Despite his advanced age, the
elder Mayo was preternaturally energetic, even practicing with his sons for
a decade upon their graduation from medical school.
Dr. Mayo graduated from the University of Missouri school of medicine
in 1854, and upon graduation, his only option was to immediately enter
practice—residency had not yet been invented. He eventually moved to
Rochester in 1864, at a time when the town boasted only three thousand
inhabitants.^8 After struggling to establish himself in Rochester, the
ambitious “Little Doctor” (he stood 5' 4" tall) traveled to New York City
and Philadelphia in 1869 to observe surgeons at work. Lister’s technique
of antiseptic surgery was brand new, and by the time Dr. Mayo returned to
Rochester, his ideas about surgery had been transformed. The last time he
had been in New York, in 1846, anesthesia had just been invented, and now
for a second time he was witness to a scientific revolution.
For a man who had moved innumerable times and held countless jobs,
his wanderlust was finally sated in 1874, and he would live in Rochester,
as a surgeon, the rest of his life. By the time he became president of the
Minnesota State Medical Society in 1873, Dr. Mayo had gained a regional
reputation for his surgical skills. All of his medical care was provided in