Medicine: Mayo Clinic Publicity

Drs. William James and Charles Horace Mayo, best-known U. S. medical team, dread publicity. It hurts business at their expensive clinic in remote Rochester, Minn, where they and the 400 doctors whom they employ treat more than 700 new sick people every day and where in a few weeks they expect to work on their 1,000,000th patient. Essentially the Mayo brothers care little for wealth. Although they charge every patient precisely according to national credit agencies’ reports, one fourth of the Mayo patients are worth nothing and pay no fees. The Mayo Clinic is to be donated to some medical school when the brothers die. This probably will be the University of Minnesota’s Graduate School of Medicine which the Mayos have already endowed with $2,500,000.

Despite this charitarian attitude, jealous and envious doctors constantly try to keep their patients from the ministrations of the famed and expert Mayos. Always anxious to soothe this element in the profession, Dr. Will, the elder, immediately dictated a telegram the instant he heard last month that the Chicago Daily Times intended to print a series of illustrated articles on the Mayo Clinic. The telegram: “We are very much concerned that you are publishing a series of articles on the Mayo Clinic. Such publicity is derogatory to the dignity and achievements of the medical profession, violates our conception of professional ethics and will subject the Mayo Clinic to severe and undeserved criticism. Therefore we earnestly request that you do not publish the articles.”

The newspaper’s managing editor, Louis Ruppel, believes that “Medicine has lots of mystery, lots of intrigue, lots of sock. That’s what the public wants.” Two years ago he roused considerable reader interest and increased his circulation by a series called “Seven Days in the Kankakee State Hospital.” The diligent reporter who gathered that material, Frank Smith, 34, had spent two-and-a-half months this summer researching around the Mayo Clinic for the new series to which Dr. Will

Mayo now was objecting. Believing he had another sock medical yarn, Editor Ruppel replied: “The Times appreciated the feeling expressed by Dr. W. J. Mayo in the telegram reproduced above. But the editors believe the Mayo Clinic is an institution in which all Americans and most citizens of the civilized world have a vital interest.”

The Mayo Clinic. The newspaper articles, which ended last week, added very little to what 1,000,000 Mayo patients and the readers of a few books about the Clinic* did not already know.

The Mayo Clinic is a partnership of a few men headed by the Brothers Mayo. They and all their staff receive flat yearly salaries and collect no fees. For example, the late Edward Starr Judd, their nephew by marriage and like them a onetime president of the American Medical Association, received $75,000 a year. “Fellows” who work in the Clinic, and who must have interned elsewhere, average $70 a month and keep. Typists and secretaries average $100 a month.

The Mayos have no financial interest in any of Rochester’s five hospitals in which they and their staff practice. The oldest of these is St. Mary’s, founded and operated by Franciscan nuns. The other hospitals and largest of Rochester’s 34 hotels are owned by the Kahler Corp., of which Roy Watson, a hotel manager, is head and in which Harry Harwick, business manager of the Mayo Clinic, has a substantial interest. Some of the Kahler hotels have hospitals on the premises. Three hotels and three hospitals are connected with the Mayo Clinic by underground passageways.

The Clinic has 15 floors, a carillon tower and imposing bronze doors. On the third floor is the room of the Board of Governors. Covering all the walls of that room are framed Mayo diplomas, certificates, awards and knighthoods conferred by governments and learned societies. Outside in a glass showcase are their many academic robes. Their favorites are the red ones of the University of Manchester, England.

Rooms on other floors of the Clinic building are used for examination of patients. To take care of them all, a quick-acting system is necessary. After Joe, the Mayos’ doorman, helps a new patient through the bronze doors, a girl clerk registers the name, address, profession and the name of the personal physician, if any, who sent him. The patient then gets a number and a brown envelope to hold the reports of the diagnoses which he will undergo. An illuminated, numbered call board notifies him in what room and at what instant a Mayo diagnostician will be ready for him. Another system of illuminated call boards notifies every Mayo diagnostician when and where patients are waiting. An interlocking lighting system notifies a central desk of everybody’s whereabouts.

After a preliminary examination the patient goes into the hands of Mayo specialists. Their reports go into the big brown envelope and then, by mechanical carrier systems, to the original consultant. The patient is then sent home, to his family doctor, or to one of the hospitals in Rochester, as he prefers. No surgery or treatment takes place in the Clinic building.

This year an eminent Italian surgeon. Dr. Andrea Majocchi, described his visit to the Clinic:* “The organization and scrupulous division of labor are basic features of every truly American institution. Hotels, hospitals, public offices, warehouses—all work toward the same end: avoiding as much as possible the weakening and separation of resources and means. All function in the same way. The same working methods obtain at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research as at the Baldwin Locomotive Works at Philadelphia, the Chicago stockyards, and St. Mary’s Hospital at Rochester. . . .

“By means of such admirable organization and division of labor, preordained, thorough and carried to incredible lengths, the Mayos got results that no single independent surgeon had ever been able to obtain. All this is very good. But when one thinks that the doctors, all their life, do only one thing, more or less circumscribed —the anesthetizers, for example, who only administer ether, and so on—one thinks again (such is the insidious association of ideas) of the Armour & Company butchers in Chicago, of those expert amputators of horns, hoofs, and ears, good fellows all, but who, outside of their little specialty, can do nothing else.”

* Latest: The Mayo Clinic, written and published by Lucy Elizabeth Beeler Wilder, who operates Rochester’s best-known bookstore and is the wife of the head of the Mayo Foundation’s department of medicine, Professor Russell Morse Wilder.

* LIFE & DEATH—Knight Publications, New York ($2.75).