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Dr. Charlie, who went to Northwestern in 1885, was "only average." But after his return, three years later, he blossomed out into a brilliant surgeon. He did the operations on the head, left most of the abdominal work to his brother. While Dr. Will was stern, autocratic, self-possessed, Dr. Charlie was warm, friendly, unpretentious. He often wore rumpled old clothes, even fell into a mud puddle on the way to his wedding. Dr. Will always tried to slick him up, rarely succeeded.
Mecca of the West. In August 1883, a great tornado struck Rochester. Since there was no hospital, scores of victims were bedded in a local dance hall, were nursed by sisters of St. Francis. After the catastrophe, the nuns pinched and scraped for four years, saved several thousand dollars for a three-story brick building. Although old Dr. Mayo had been against the plan, he took charge of the hospital, ran it with his sons. Thus, unwittingly, the Mayos started one of the greatest revolutions of modern medicine: clinical group practice.
The equipment was crude (the nuns carried all the water up from the basement), but the skill of the Mayos soon jammed St. Mary's with patients from all parts of the expanding West. The hospital gave the young brothers their big chance —a large testing ground for new surgical techniques. Where other surgeons, for example, could speak of their success in a score of goiter operations, the Mayos could cite hundreds, later thousands of cases. Gradually they hired assistants who were specialists in fields like pathology, laboratory diagnosis, biochemistry, set them to work on practical research problems.
Although the brothers devised only a few original operations, they had a talent for improving on other men's ideas, the opportunity to give them mass application. They are given credit by surgeons today for perfecting or popularizing certain types of surgery for stomach ulcers, various operations for hernias, breast amputation for cancer, excision of goiters, etc.
By 1914, a large new hospital had been built. When the brothers' savings piled up to several million dollars, they donated a million and a half to create the Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research, thus established a connection with the University of Minnesota Medical School.
Today the Mayo Clinic is housed in a skyscraper building; connected with it are six hospitals and several hotels. On the staff are 200 doctors, 300 medical associates, 1,000 nurses, technicians and non-professional workers. To Rochester every year travel 100,000 patients from all over the world. Patients pay according to their means: 25%, says Miss Clapesattle, pay nothing; 30% pay bare costs of treatment; the other 45% "defray the expenses of the institution and its program." Some fees, she admits, are high, "and Dr. Will was sometimes disturbed to learn just how high."