OBITUARY

Evening Post, Volume CXXVIII, Issue 25, 29 July 1939, Page 9

OBITUARY

DR. WILLIAM J. MAYO

(Received July 29, 9 a.m.)

NEW YORK, July 28.

The death has occurred of Dr. William J. Mayo, aged 78, who, with his brother Charles, who died on May 26, founded the famous Mayo- Clinic at Rochester.

Dr. William James Mayo was born at Le Sueur, Minnesota, in 1861 and was educated at Rochester High School and Nile Academy, taking his VI.D. at the University of Michigan in 1883. He did post-graduate work in the New York Medical School in 1884 and took a M.D. degree at the New York Polyclinic in the following year. In 1883 he began to practise surgery in Rochester and six years later became surgeon to the famous Mayo clinic at St. Mary's Hospital. With his brother he donated the 2,500,000 dollars needed to establish the Mayo Foundation for medical education and research at Rochester. In the war years he became a colonel

in the United States Medical Corps and in 1921 was transferred to the reserve with the rank of brigadier general. The Mayo Clinic became famous as an example of correlated activity in medicine, and Dr. Mayo won many honours. including degrees from about 20 universities, and decorations from Sweden, Cuba, and Italy. In 1934 he received a commemorative plaque • from the hands of the President of the United States, he was an elector of the Hall of Fame, a Regent of the University of Minnesota, President of the American Surgical Association, of the American Society of Clinical Surgeons, of the Congress of American Physicians, and a member of many medical bodies. He visited the Antipodes in 1924, and in 1931 in commemoration of his seventieth birthday, and to mark the appreciation of New Zealand medical men of the work of his clinic and The courtesy which had been shown New Zealand visitors to it, a New Zealand painting was sent to him.