A tornado and a handshake deal with nuns built the Mayo Clinic
In August 1883 a tornado flattened a third of Rochester, Minnesota. The local doctor who organised care for the injured, William Worrall Mayo, borrowed nurses from a teaching order of Franciscan sisters, and their founder then offered to fund a hospital if the Mayos would staff it.
Mayo, born near Manchester in 1819 and mentored by the chemist John Dalton, crossed to America in 1846 and drifted west through Indiana to Minnesota Territory. Work as an examining surgeon for the Union Army draft board brought him to Rochester, and on 27 January 1864 he advertised a practice above a drugstore, promising to answer calls day or night. His sons William and Charles, known as Dr. Will and Dr. Charlie, joined him in 1883 and 1888.
The storm that August killed at least 37 people and hurt more than 200. When it passed, Mother Alfred Moes of the Sisters of Saint Francis proposed that her order raise money for a hospital and the Mayos provide the medicine. The deal was sealed with a handshake, and Saint Mary's Hospital opened on 30 September 1889 with all three Mayos on staff.
From the 1890s the brothers invited colleagues in, turning a family practice into a group one. The most influential newcomer, the thyroid specialist Henry Plummer, invented a shared patient record so doctors no longer relayed information by word of mouth or letter, and he designed hospital gadgets from pneumatic tubes to sinks worked with the knee. The clinic pioneered checking frozen tissue for cancer mid-surgery in 1905, and in 1935 it opened the first blood bank based in a hospital. In 1919 the brothers and their wives gave away the buildings, equipment and most of their savings to make the clinic a nonprofit.
It has since spread to Jacksonville, helped by 400 acres donated by the Davis family, and to Arizona, and in 2020 it took full ownership of a clinic in central London. By 2022 it employed around 76,000 people and saw more than 1.3 million patients from all 50 states and 138 countries, with research funding topping $1 billion that year.
Source: Mayo Clinic
