Medicine: Mayo Clinic Publicity

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Drs. William James and Charles Horace Mayo, best-known U. S. medical team, dread publicity. It hurts business at their expensive clinic in remote Rochester, Minn, where they and the 400 doctors whom they employ treat more than 700 new sick people every day and where in a few weeks they expect to work on their 1,000,000th patient. Essentially the Mayo brothers care little for wealth. Although they charge every patient precisely according to national credit agencies' reports, one fourth of the Mayo patients are worth nothing and pay no fees. The Mayo Clinic is to be donated to some medical school when the brothers die. This probably will be the University of Minnesota's Graduate School of Medicine which the Mayos have already endowed with $2,500,000.

Despite this charitarian attitude, jealous and envious doctors constantly try to keep their patients from the ministrations of the famed and expert Mayos. Always anxious to soothe this element in the profession, Dr. Will, the elder, immediately dictated a telegram the instant he heard last month that the Chicago Daily Times intended to print a series of illustrated articles on the Mayo Clinic. The telegram: "We are very much concerned that you are publishing a series of articles on the Mayo Clinic. Such publicity is derogatory to the dignity and achievements of the medical profession, violates our conception of professional ethics and will subject the Mayo Clinic to severe and undeserved criticism. Therefore we earnestly request that you do not publish the articles."

The newspaper's managing editor, Louis Ruppel, believes that "Medicine has lots of mystery, lots of intrigue, lots of sock. That's what the public wants." Two years ago he roused considerable reader interest and increased his circulation by a series called "Seven Days in the Kankakee State Hospital." The diligent reporter who gathered that material, Frank Smith, 34, had spent two-and-a-half months this summer researching around the Mayo Clinic for the new series to which Dr. Will

Mayo now was objecting. Believing he had another sock medical yarn, Editor Ruppel replied: "The Times appreciated the feeling expressed by Dr. W. J. Mayo in the telegram reproduced above. But the editors believe the Mayo Clinic is an institution in which all Americans and most citizens of the civilized world have a vital interest."

The Mayo Clinic. The newspaper articles, which ended last week, added very little to what 1,000,000 Mayo patients and the readers of a few books about the Clinic* did not already know.

The Mayo Clinic is a partnership of a few men headed by the Brothers Mayo. They and all their staff receive flat yearly salaries and collect no fees. For example, the late Edward Starr Judd, their nephew by marriage and like them a onetime president of the American Medical Association, received $75,000 a year. "Fellows" who work in the Clinic, and who must have interned elsewhere, average $70 a month and keep. Typists and secretaries average $100 a month.