William W. Mayo

William Worrall Mayo (/ˈmeɪjoʊ/; May 31, 1819 – March 6, 1911) was a British-American medical doctor and chemist. He is best known for establishing the private medical practice that later evolved into the Mayo Clinic. He was a descendant of a famous English chemist, John Mayow. His sons, William James Mayo and Charles Horace Mayo, established a joint medical practice in Rochester in the U.S. state of Minnesota in the 1880s.

William Worall Mayo was born in Salford, Greater Manchester, England, and studied science in Manchester under John Dalton, the chemist and physicist responsible for formulating the modern atomic theory of matter and devising a table of relative atomic weights. Mayo left for the U.S. in 1846. His first work in his new country was as a pharmacist at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, though he soon moved westward.

Mayo spent a brief period of time in Buffalo, New York before settling in Lafayette, Indiana where he worked as a tailor (one of the vocations he had while in England). He returned to medicine in 1849, assisting in a cholera outbreak and then attending courses at Indiana Medical College in La Porte, Indiana where he earned his medical degree. Although the training there would probably be considered mediocre by modern standards, the school did have a microscope, an uncommon tool at the time. Knowledge of how to use this instrument proved to be useful in Mayo's future practice. He received his M.D. degree on February 14, 1850.

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