Many have heard of The Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, but few know of its Catholic origin.
On August 21, 1883, just after six in the evening, the sky over Rochester, Minnesota turned a reddish color. Twenty minutes later, a tornado struck and a third of the town was gone. Thirty-seven people were dead. More than two hundred were bleeding in the streets. The only doctor in town was William Worrall Mayo, an English country doctor who settled here in 1864. He was 64 years old and noted for his skeptical, evidence-based approach to medicine and religion.
The city of Rochester had no hospital, so a convent school on the edge of town emptied out to become a makeshift hospital. The nuns walked into the wreckage in full habits, led by a woman named Mother Alfred Moes. Born in Remich, Luxembourg, Mother Alfred Moes emigrated to the United States in 1851 with her sister Catherine. Highly educated and multilingual, she joined the Franciscan Third Order Regular in 1863 and soon became the first General Superior of the Sisters of St. Francis of Mary Immaculate in Joliet, Illinois.
The sisters took over Rommel’s dance hall and turned it into a hospital overnight. None of them had ever been trained in nursing. They learned it then and there, with Doctor Mayo giving orders and the injured laid out on the floorboards. That was certainly “on-the-job” training!
When the last patient was gone, Mother Alfred went to see Doctor Mayo. She told him Rochester needed a real hospital. A permanent one. She said she had seen it, a great hospital rising out of the cornfields on the west edge of town, and that she wanted him to run it.
Mayo told her the hard truth: a building like that would cost $40,000. Well over a million in today’s money. He said no congregation of school teaching nuns could possibly raise it. She did not argue with him. She simply told him that if he would take charge of the hospital, the sisters would take charge of paying for it.
Then she went out and did it:
For six years, her sisters taught school and handed over their wages. Every dollar. She bought nine acres of farmland. She hired the builders. She oversaw the plans herself and, when the money ran short, she found more.
Saint Marys Hospital opened on September 30, 1889. Twenty seven beds. Thirteen sisters, none of them nurses by training. Dr. Mayo, now 70, walked in as chief of staff with his two sons, Will and Charlie, beside him. Those two boys built their surgical practice inside her building. Patients started arriving from Chicago, then from every state, then from overseas. The brothers formalized the partnership in 1919 and gave it their family name: The Mayo Clinic. Today, it treats more than a million patients a year and is ranked the best hospital in the United States.
Mother Alfred Moes died on December 18, 1899, ten years after the doors opened.
The Mayo brothers always said it plainly: Their father did not want the hospital. The nun did. She built it, and then she handed them the keys.
The Mayo Clinic became a charitable and educational corporation in 1919 with the creation of the Mayo Foundation and is known for high-quality care, accurate diagnoses, and innovation in for treating complex medical cases through tertiary and destination medicine (“Destination medicine” refers to programs that help patients travel across regions or countries to receive specialized medical care), it was recognized as the No. 1 hospital in the world by Newsweek Magazine, among others.
In addition to the campus in Rochester, Mayo Clinic operates major campuses in Jacksonville, Florida and Phoenix/Scottsdale, Arizona. It also maintains the Mayo Clinic Health System, with more than 70 affiliated facilities across Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa.
Millions of Americans have made the drive to Rochester with someone they love in the passenger seat…..almost none of them knew that the whole thing started with a 54-year-old woman standing in tornado wreckage, refusing to accept a “no”.