dreaming about. Constructing a hospital building with modern features
was also possible; filling it with up-to-the-minute technology was a
necessity—in fact a Mayo staple to this day—that helped the Mayo
brothers leapfrog everyone in the region, and eventually, the world.
Six years after the ruinous tempest, Saint Marys Hospital opened its
doors in 1889. For several more years, the three Mayo surgeons all
operated together, and the numbers are nothing short of astounding.
Another longstanding hallmark of Mayo practice was the inclination to
visit other surgeons. The “Grand Tour” tradition of Europeans (and
particularly, the British) traveling throughout the Continent had been well
established by the 19th century, and as travel became more reliable,
Americans made the European voyage as well. David McCullough’s book
The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris details the pilgrimages of
American painters, writers, sculptors, and doctors to Paris between 1830
and 1900. While the French had dominated medicine from the French
Revolution till the last third of the 19th century, world leadership tilted
east to Vienna and Berlin, and they became meccas for aspiring surgeons.
First, however, the Mayo brothers would follow the lead of their father in
traveling by train to New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Baltimore, and
only later traveling to Europe.
In 1889, the three-story, forty-five-bed hospital only contained one
operating room, and in the first decade, the only surgeons were the Mayo
brothers. Within five years, an addition was needed, and by 1894 there was
a second operating room and a total of seventy-five beds. The same year
that the original Saint Marys Hospital opened, Johns Hopkins Hospital had
opened. In 1895, Will Mayo traveled to Baltimore to watch William
Halsted and Howard Kelly operate, and recorded in his diary his
impressions of the Hopkins surgeons: “Rubber sole shoes. Operating suits.
Iodoform, Boric Acid & Bismuth. Sterilize by steam. Circle tables for
instrument trays. Rubber gloves. Mattress stitch. Subcuticular stitch.”^10
Will Mayo would be the driving force behind the success of the Mayo
Clinic for the next half century. Instead of tepid satisfaction with a small-
town hospital, a series of hires was made that truly launched Rochester to
the forefront of worldwide medicine. Instead of playing it safe and
keeping their practice a two-man team of brothers, Will and Charlie hired
additional diagnosticians who would screen the patients and perform
testing with the latest laboratory techniques. By 1895, the brothers were