Charles Horace Mayo

Charles Horace Mayo (1865 to 1939) was an American surgeon and one of the founders of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, which he built with his brother William James Mayo and their partners. He took his medical degree at Northwestern University in 1888 and joined the family practice of his father, William Worrall Mayo. His own surgical work concentrated on the thyroid and the nervous system, and he also looked after the clinic ophthalmic patients until 1908. He and his early partners insisted on sterile conditions in the operating room, one of the factors the source credits for the practice early surgical results. The private practice became the not-for-profit Mayo Clinic in 1919, organised as an integrated group practice. Mayo served as president of the American College of Surgeons from 1923 to 1925 and of the American Medical Association in 1916 and 1917, and he was a professor of surgery at the University of Minnesota. He died of pneumonia in Chicago in 1939.