"In our current debate over health care reform, the Mayo Clinic is considered a model of high-quality, efficient health care where teams of salaried medical personnel work

together to diagnose and treat all kinds of health problems. The Mayo Clinic has been known for a century for its diagnostic expertise, its emphasis on pathology. How did that emphasis develop?

Folwell’s A History of Minnesota (IV, 113) states: “In 1905 began an expansion of the Mayo Clinic…. From the beginning the Mayos had considered general diagnosis—the detection of diseases from obvious physical conditions, such as the pulse, the temperature, the color of the skin, and so forth—of capital importance and carried it on in ways as old as Galen. It was not until 1905 that they were able to command the space and employ an expert for a laboratory where, by chemical analyses, the microscope, the Roentgen ray, or ‘X-ray,’ apparatus, diagnosis could be extended far beyond that possible with the unaided eye, hand, and ear. The result was an avalanche of people resorting to Rochester to be examined and told what ailed them. (…) The opening of the laboratories and the consequent influx of people with nearly all kinds of diseases for diagnosis was followed by an expansion of the clinic.” Here, the Mayo brothers’ medical practice became The Mayo Clinic.

The young physician and scientist Louis Blanchard Wilson, of 1005 15th Ave. SE, was the “expert” hired by the Mayo brothers in 1905 to develop diagnostic laboratories and teach pathology at St. Mary’s Hospital in Rochester.

Born in 1866 in Pittsburgh, PA, Louis B. Wilson came to Minnesota in the 1880s and taught biology at St. Paul’s Central High School from 1888 to 1896. He received his

Doctorate of Medicine from the University of Minnesota in 1896. He moved his young family to the Como neighborhood when the University hired him in 1897 to be senior demonstrator, then Assistant Professor, of Pathology; he held these positions from 1897 to 1905. He was also Assistant Director of the Bacteriologic Laboratory of the Minnesota State Board of Health, whose goal was to study the nature, causes, treatment, and especially the prevention of infectious and contagious diseases in humans and animals.

Louis B. Wilson was head of Pathology at the Mayo Clinic, and Director of the Mayo Foundation, until his retirement in 1937. He died in Rochester in 1942, a respected

foundational figure in Mayo Clinic history."

Como People of the Past article

By Connie Sullivan

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