Background
William Worrall Mayo was born on May 31, 1819 in Manchester, England, of well-to-do parents, in a family many of whom had been physicians.
William Worrall Mayo was born on May 31, 1819 in Manchester, England, of well-to-do parents, in a family many of whom had been physicians.
He attended Owens College, Manchester, where he studied physics with John Dalton. In 1847 he took up the study of medicine with Dr. Eleazer Deming of Lafayette, Ind. , and two years later entered the Medical School of the University of Missouri in St. Louis, where he gave instruction in chemistry while completing his medical course. In 1871 he took a postgraduate course in medicine at Bellevue Hospital in New York.
Coming to America when twenty-six years of age, he taught physics and chemistry in New York for some two years. After receiving his medical degree from the University of Missouri in 1854, he returned to La Porte, Ind. , and began the practice of medicine. In the spring of 1855 Mayo removed with his family, consisting of his wife and two daughters, to St. Paul, Minn. , then on the extreme frontier of civilization. His experiences in the next ten years were typical of those of the pioneer physicians of the period. The habit he acquired during this time of failing to collect his professional accounts became fixed for the rest of his life. Besides treating the sick he took part in the further organization of the territory, serving as chairman of the first board of county commissioners of St. Louis County. He located the county seat at a point where the city of Duluth is now built. He took the census of 1855 in St. Louis County. In 1856 he settled on a farm near Le Sueur, Minn. , and a year later became a resident of Le Sueur. During this year and the next he also engaged in steam boating on the Minnesota River with James J. Hill. In 1862 Mayo served as a surgeon with a relief force sent to quell the Sioux Indian outbreak in the vicinity of New Ulm, and in the spring of the following year was appointed provost surgeon for southern Minnesota with headquarters in Rochester, where he soon became the leading physician and surgeon of Olmstead County. When in 1883 a cyclone killed twenty-two persons and injured many others in the town of Rochester, Mayo was placed in charge of an emergency hospital for the injured and was assisted by the sisters of the Order of St. Francis. Two years later this Order began the erection of a forty-bed hospital on the edge of town. This original building is still the central nucleus of an institution (St. Mary's) now grown to a capacity of more than eight hundred beds. He died on March 6, 1911 in Rochester in his ninety-second year, after an illness which was the result of an accident.
Mayo took an active interest in politics, serving as mayor of Rochester several times and as state senator twice, in spite of the fact that he was a liberal Democrat living in a Republican state and community.
Mayo was an untiring practitioner of medicine at a time when country practice in Minnesota was a very laborious task. His fierce struggle to wrest a precarious living from adverse nature in the wilderness developed a rugged manhood which formed a stable setting for, without burying, his scholarly and professional training.
In 1851, Mayo married Louise Abigail Wright, who had been born December 23, 1825, in New York. From the time they were twelve years of age, his two sons, William James Mayo and Charles Horace Mayo, were his companions and assistants whenever possible.