Charles Horace Mayo: 1865-1939

Charles Mayo was born in Rochester, Minnesota, on July 19, 1865, the son of William Worrall Mayo, a native of England and a general practitioner of medicine who had settled in the territory of Minnesota in 1855. The young boy accompanied his father and elder brother, William J. Mayo, on innumerable trips in both the village and the country as the father traveled to his patients. On several occasions he administered ether to the patients before he had earned his diploma in medicine. Charles Mayo studied in the public schools of Rochester, and received the degree of Doctor of Medicine from Northwestern University in 1888. When Mayo had been home for about a year, assisting his father and elder brother in their practice of general medicine, the sisters of St. Francis founded St. Mary’s Hospital in Rochester. Charles was one of three on the staff at the new hospital, the other two being his father and his elder brother. In later years, the elder brother recalled, “Charlie soon had me driven to cover by being a better surgeon, and I began to specialize in abdominal work and in operations on the ureters and kidneys.” He could master a difficult situation with exceptional speed, and he had a facility in a variety of challenging surgical problems which soon found him performing such dissimilar procedures as excision of a knee joint, sectioning of the gasserian ganglion, and hysterectomy. He also acquired a high degree of skill in operations on the eye, head, and neck, while his brother concentrated on abdominal operations. He devoted himself to the very extensive practice which he and his brother carried on together, after their father retired from active practice around 1890. The two brothers enlisted the aid of a third physician in 1892, another in 1901, and many others as the practice founded by their father in 1863 became well known in southern Minnesota, and then throughout the state. By 1903 the name Mayo Clinic was known not only to persons who sought the services of the brothers and their associates, but by other physicians outside the small group of practitioners in Rochester. In 1915, Charles and his brother established the Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research as a part of the Graduate School of the University of Minnesota, with fellowships in various specialities. The Mayos became famous teachers and were regarded with profound affection and respect by the hundreds of young surgeons who worked with them. This classic paper gives a fascinating perspective of the state of colon and rectal surgery at the turn of the century. In it Mayo suggests the advisability of the synchronous combined approach “if the surgeon has a good assistant.” He is believed to be the first to recommend this maneuver. Honors of every description were conferred upon Charles Mayo, as they were upon his elder brother. He was elected president of the Western Surgical Association, the Society of Clinical Surgery, the Clinical Congress of Surgeons of North America, the American Medical Association, the American College of Surgeons, and the American Surgical Association. He died in Chicago, where he had contracted penumonia during a visit, on May 26, 1939, at the age of 73. The death of his brother followed two months later.