The Doctors Mayo
SUCCESS STORY.
By Karlee Seawell | Pre- Optometry Major
“About 6’O clock in the evening William and Charles Mayo, their day’s work done, started off in a buggy to the slaughter house to get a sheep’s head upon which to practice an eye operation that night” (qtd. in Adenwalla). However, on that fateful day on August 21st, 1883, a powerful tornado ripped apart the sleepy green countryside of Rochester, Minnesota. Concurrently around the time that the two brothers, William and Charles Mayo, were just graduating from medical school. The casualties of the tragedy were only rising when the Mayo brothers, William and Charles, as well as their father, Dr. William Worrall Mayo, stepped in to treat the injured. During this period of recovery and treatment, the Sisters of St Francis proposed an alternative to the current practice of medicine, where doctors worked alone. They proposed to Dr. William Worrall Mayo that if they could conjure the necessary funds to build a hospital, Dr. W.W. Mayo would be its founding doctor. After the building of the hospital, St Mary’s Hospital originally, Dr. Worrall Mayo took charge and began his practice in the hospital along with his sons, Dr. William and Dr. Charles as well as the Sisters of St Francis as their nurses. St Mary’s Hospital would begin the practice of doctors and nurses working communally with each other, which we now see as commonplace. St Mary’s hospital continued to grow and employed many more doctors than just the original three and were advancing medical practice worldwide which has grown into what we know today as the Mayo Clinic. Their success was not just dependent on the tragedy. They owe their success to their early exposure to medicine, tragedies that became opportunities to practice, and overall, a family legacy of doctors.
Their success was not just dependent on the tragedy. They owe their success to their early exposure to medicine, tragedies that became opportunities to practice, and overall, a family legacy of doctors.
According to Malcolm Gladwell in his book, Outliers: The Story of Success, Gladwell theorized that in order to become an expert, you must acquire ten thousand hours or more of practice. Great musical icons of the 20th century, The Beatles, did not really take off until they had reached those ten thousand hours of practice in Hamburg, Germany. “And what was so special about Hamburg? It wasn’t that it paid well. It didn’t. Or that the acoustics were fantastic. They weren’t. Or that the audiences were savvy and appreciative. They were anything but. It was the sheer amount of time they were forced to play” (qtd. in Gladwell). They took every opportunity to perform and rehearse which is what eventually lead them to being wildly successful. As we can learn from the Beatles, success is not an easy path to go down. That path includes more than just entirely success. Honestly, they probably failed more times than they succeeded before they made it big. However, when we look at their route to success, their ten thousand hours alone didn’t bring them to success. The Beatles were given many opportunities to perform and thus, better themselves. They gained support from their community as well. All of these things helped make the Beatles the Beatles, great icons of the 20th century.
If you have ever examined the habits of successful people, you should have found that hard work, even if success is made up of many different pieces, is vital to becoming successful. For the Mayo brothers, their start came from their early exposure to medicine when they were just in grade school. Their father, Dr. William Worrall, and their mother taught them anatomy and medical treatment when they were only young boys. “He and Mrs Mayo inspired two dedicated sons for whom, as Dr. Charlie wrote, “Work is the best play””(qtd. in Casscells).Just to be born into a family that had a legacy of doctors was their first and greatest opportunity in life. And in that case, to have a father who was one of the best doctors in the country at the time. The fact that both their mother and father were rather medically inclined by nature influenced the early lives of two of the world’s greatest doctors, William and Charles Mayo. Their early exposure to medicine was not just taught to them with books, Dr. William Worrall also included his son in his surgical procedure, allowing the boys to help. ”Their father took his two sons with him on professional visits, explaining his diagnoses and methods of treatment and encouraging them to express their opinions freely. The brothers assisted their father in his surgical operations, anatomical dissections, and postmortems” (qtd. in Baughman). Nowadays, perhaps putting a scalpel into the hands of a teenager seems absurdly dangerous but these experiences for the Mayo brothers assisted their transformation from boys from small town Rochester to young doctors that wound up changing the world of medicine. Now, as you can imagine, having their lives revolve almost fully around medicine also gained them their ten thousand hours very early. How influential it must have been to have such early exposure to the world of medicine to turn such average boys into world-changing doctors of the 20th century.
Just as those ten thousand hours influence success, the factors that someone is born into greatly adjusts the path to success. This theory from Malcolm Gladwell’s, The Tipping Point, explains how the success of something as trivial as shoes have a tipping point. Societal trends, major events, and demographics all determine the future of success for everything. For example, the success of those vintage shoes that had become unpopular, hush puppies, made a comeback due to the fact that the right people started wearing them at the right time in the right place that made them trendy again. “They were wearing them precisely because no one else would wear them. What they were looking for in fashion was a revolutionary statement. They were willing to take risks in order to set themselves apart” (qtd. in Gladwell).Really this theory could be explained as just sheer luck. But it can also be explained as the unlikely series of opportunities that wind up creating success. Computer genius, Bill Gates was just your average kid. He would have also become just an average guy had it not been for the extraordinary opportunities he had to be successful. “It was my obsession,” Gates says of his early high school years. “I skipped athletics. I went up there at night. We were programming on weekends. It would be a rare week that we didn’t get twenty or thirty hours in” (Gates qtd. in Gladwell).He just happened to live near a computer center in which he spent much of his time, just happened to be given free access to a computer in exchange for working on an automated payroll program, which led him to start Microsoft. However, as we know by now, success isn’t just made up of one factor. Tipping points don’t just happen. This fact alone makes success seem almost unlikely or even impossible. How can it be that all of the prior factors that go in to success happen to just one person, or in this case, two?
This is what makes success so incredible. Success came to William and Charles Mayo in the form of their birth, their early medical experience, and now, the opportunities they had to unknowingly continue on their paths to success. Of course, these opportunities did not always start off with good intention. The Mayo brothers happened to be just the right age to be drafted into World War 1 as doctors. It seems difficult to even imagine treating the dead and dying on a chaotic battlefield as being beneficial. Their experiences could have caused so much damage but by the grace of God, war convinced the Mayo brothers learn as much as they could about medicine and treatment. After the war, the brothers continued their practice at St Mary’s and to increase their knowledge, would visit medical schools and hospitals around the world to learn new surgical techniques and medical procedures. Often said is that when one brother was away traveling, they would always teach each other what they learned after their return. One of the greatest advances they made was the implementation of sanitation in surgery. During that time period, if a surgery was successful, the patient would tend to die of infection instead. However, the new theory of sanitation saw an improvement in survival rates among patients in St Mary’s Hospital. The discovery, as simple as it may sound, opened up a whole new world of the effects of sanitation and infection. ”Gowns and gloves were becoming a common sight in the operating room, as was thorough cleaning pf surfaces, including hands and tools. The dressings covering wounds were now changed at least once a day rather than “once a stay”. Drs. Will and Charlie encouraged these practices, and the medical world took note that their success rates were much higher than those of most other physicians” (qtd. in Anaya-Prado). They both truly desired to learn as much about the body as possible so that they could give each patient the best opportunity to return to good health that they turned their small clinic in Minnesota into a center for medical research and treatment. The brothers were given numerous opportunities to succeed which leads me to only one question. What did they leave behind?
In Gladwell’s, Outliers, Gladwell theorized that the ancestry of a person effects who that person turns out to be. Say, for example, your ancestors were all doctors and lawyers. Based on Gladwell’s theory, that person would also have a higher likelihood of becoming a doctor or lawyer than someone from a family of farmers or craftsmen. Why is this? Well, it is because of the cultural legacies of past generations that are carried through to the present generation that affect the success of everyone. “You have to go back two or three or four hundred years, to a country on the other side of the ocean, and look closely at what exactly the people in a very specific geographic area of that country did for a living” (qtd. in Gladwell). Now, think for a minute about what the typical British, French, Russian, Spanish, or any other nationality’s behavior stereotype is. Many of us would have preconceived ideas about what each one of those people would be like such as an Angry Russians or Germans, or snooty Brits or French. We think like this because of the behaviors of previous generations that became who we are now. We all carry with us what our ancestors gave us which may sound absurd seeing as nobody has met their great-great-great grandfather. This theory shows us how these cultural legacies can affect the current generation through feuds between different culture groups, a great example being the rivalry between the French and British for hundreds of years. And if we can narrow this theory down to a single family line, we find that ancestry does affect your likelihood to succeed.
The theory of cultural legacy is directly shown the Mayo family. First and foremost, William and Charles’ father was a doctor. The first clue to revealing the future of the family line is this first quality. If we look at the Mayo family line after the Mayo brothers, William and Charles, there is an overwhelming number of doctors and other successful professions that can be seen leading up to today. “The dedication to patients was passed down from their parents, William and Louise Mayo, who once mortgaged their house to purchase a $600 microscope for the elder Mayo’s practice, where the brothers received their early training”(qtd. in Finkel). This is because of cultural, or in this case, family legacy. While this does not explain why these future generations were successful entirely, it certainly provides a basis for their success. Based on what we have learned about the components of success, there is not only one determining factor to predict success. In the Mayo’s case, however, we can see that this family legacy has played a large part in determining the outcome of the current decedents of the Mayo brothers.
So, to look back on the success of the Mayo brothers, not only was there a family lineage of doctors, they were also given a multitude of opportunities even if did not seen very opportunistic, and they took these opportunities to practice as much as they could and reached their ten thousand hours early. Their impact on the medical world can be seen through practices they readily accepted that are still in use today. “As stated earlier, the idea of sterilizing the operating room was seen as irrelevant in the 1800s. Only toward the end of that century was the idea of aseptic surgery accepted. The May brothers become doctors during the beginning of this new trend, and they quickly embraced it” (qtd. in Anaya-Prado). The Mayo Clinic has become a main source of medical knowledge and service. So far have they progressed from the small hospital in the early 20th century to the major, world-renowned clinic in our own backyard. William and Charles Mayo still influence many aspiring doctors today, including myself because of their determination to serve people so generously and servant’s hearts. They are truly a magnificent source of inspiration for everyone aspiring to serve others as they did.
Works Cited:
Adenwalla HS. Mayo Clinic. Indian Journal of Plastic Surgery. 2015;48:227–230
Baughman, Judith S. “Mayo, William, James 1861–1939 and Mayo, Charles Horace 1865–1939.” American Decades 2 (2001): 1910–919. Gale Virtual Reference Library, 2001. Web. 19 Feb. 2016.
Casscells III, S. Ward. A Pilgrimage. Military Medicine Dec. 2009: 1241. EBSCO MegaFILE. Web. 27 Apr. 2016.
Ericsson,K.Anders, Krampe, Ralf Th., Tesch-Romer, Clemens. The role of deliberate practice in the Acquisition in expert performance. Physiological Review Vol 100 363–406. 1993.
Finkel, Ed. Brand of Brothers. Modern Healthcare 39.12 (2009): H4-H9. EBSCO MegaFILE. Web. 27 Apr.2016.
Gladwell, Malcolm. Outliers: The Story of Success. New York: Little Brown and Company, 2008. Print.
— -.Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make A Big Difference. New York: Little Brown and Company, 2000. Print.
My Brother and I: The Founding of Mayo Clinic. Dir. Mark T. Flaherty. Perf. Garrison Keillor. Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research, 2008. DVD.
Rubi, Marisol Godinez. Anaya-Prado, Roberto. William and Charles Mayo: Their influence on American Medicine. Journal of Investigative Surgery. Vol. 20, Issue 6(325–329). Print.
S. Ward, Casscells. A Pilgrimage. Military Medicine. Vol. 174, Issue 12, Page 1241. 2009. Print.
Toleda-Pereya, Luis H. The Mayo Brothers: an American Surgical Legacy. Journal of Investigative Surgery. Sept,P 244–248. 2010. Print.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Karlee Seawell, a high school senior from Mounds View, Minn., seeks to become an optometrist in the near future. Class of 2020, she studies at the University of St Thomas as an undergraduate in pre-optometry . She enjoys playing piano, discussing theology, and studying the German language.
WHAT I’VE LEARNED:
You don’t have to be a great writer to write a great paper.
Always prepare to analyze more than you thought you would.
It is easier to be early on your assignments.
Your classmates are not judging you as harshly as you think they are. They are just like you.
Sometimes it is necessary to stay up until three in the morning to finish a paper and it feels like a chore but it pays off.
No matter how hard I work, everything surrounding me affects my success.
It is easier to write six or seven pages than I once thought. I always find it difficult to write even two pages but when I have an interesting subject I find I can write more than I thought.
Don’t work solo if you don’t have to. Classmates make the writing process much easier and less stressful.
Always start with an idea you are passionate about. You will always create a successful paper.
I was originally frightened of the upperclassmen. More experienced and accomplished, I thought they could see right through me and be able to tell I was in high school, a novice. I didn’t realize until second semester that nobody would know if I didn’t tell them. And being in high school can work to my advantage by having double the support system. It is to your benefit to use all the support you are given even though it seems embarrassing to be asking for help.
