"Doctor Charlie"

Last week an old man, fighting for breath, was wheeled into Chicago's Mercy Hospital. Five grave doctors hovered over his bed, took samples of his sputum to type the pneumococci that had attacked him, samples of his blood to type him for transfusions. They covered him with an oxygen tent, inoculated him with pneumonia serum, fed him the famed pneumonia specific, sulfapyridine. Mercy Hospital's Patient No. 1939-2468 was a very special case: he was the junior partner of America's most famous medical team--Dr. Charles Horace Mayo. As it does with the greatest efficiency for 80,000 patients a year in the great Mayo Clinic at Rochester, Minn., medical science did all it could for 73-year-old Dr. Mayo, who had been suddenly stricken while traveling in the Middle West. But his was a hopeless case. Few days later he was dead.

Although mourned by grateful thousands all over the world, "Doctor Charlie" was known as the co-organizer of America's most streamlined medical factory rather than as a practicing physician. To millions of Americans, the Mayo Clinic, with its staff of 160 top-flight physicians, its swift conveyor-belt system in which invalids, nameless but numbered, are shunted from consultants to specialists to surgeons, has long been known as the Supreme Court of condemned patients. To thousands of forward-looking physicians, the 50-year-old Clinic, which long ago initiated group practice and dispensed with family doctors, stands as a model for medical practice of the future. And to admiring Europeans the Mayo Clinic is as peculiar a contribution of U. S. culture as the Ford factory or the Heinz pickle works.

"Brokennose." Dr. Charlie took his earliest lessons in anatomy as a small boy. In the Sioux uprising of 1862 Dr. William Worrall Mayo, father of the two famed brothers, had helped capture 38 big, powerful Indians, helped string them up wholesale along the banks of the Minnesota River. Scientifically-minded settlers who wanted a dead Indian could help themselves. "Father got Chief Broken-nose," wrote Dr. Charlie many years later. "We had a large kettle and that is where Will and I studied bones."

In 1883, five years before Dr. Charlie graduated from medical school at Northwestern University, a cyclone hit Rochester, injuring 300 citizens. Appalled at Rochester's lack of facilities, old Dr. Mayo began to build a clinic. When it opened in 1889, he was 70 and ready to retire, but both sons pitched in and divided the work between them. From the beginning they specialized in surgery. Will did abdomens; Charlie, everything else. They worked up a large practice, went East and abroad for extensive postgraduate study, and in 15 years found themselves world-famous.

Rich & Poor. Last year the millionth Mayo patient passed through the Clinic doors. In a half-century of partnership the Mayos have made millions, but they have restricted themselves and their staff to small salaries, have turned back their surplus profits to the Clinic and the University of Minnesota. In 1915 they founded a graduate school in connection with the University of Minnesota. Shrewd, dignified Dr. Will, now 77 and recovering in Rochester from a gastric ulcer operation, has managed finances with an eagle eye. Poor patients (approximately one-fourth of the Mayo practice) pay nothing, sometimes get checks instead of bills. Rich patients pay huge sums, computed from their rating in national credit agencies.

Bones in the Sky. Short, shaggy Dr. Charlie was a pioneer in goiter operations and surgery of the nervous system. Lacking the brilliance of Cleveland's George Washington Crile, the originality of Yale's Harvey Gushing, he ranked, by hard work and versatility, among the best U. S. surgeons.

Last year Dr. Charlie rated the longest entry in Who's Who, but he still remained a bluff, kindly farm doctor. He spoke of tumors "large as turnips," of goiters like ears of corn shedding their husks. On his fertile farm "Mayowood" he delighted to show guests his hothouses, which were roofed not with window panes, but with old X-ray plates taken from the Clinic. At night, instead of stars, curious visitors saw bones and intestines outlined against the heavens.

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