Two years after this was published, Charles Mayo would found the Mayo Clinic, the Minnesota-based nonprofit medical research center that is ranked was the best hospital in the nation last year by U.S. News and World Report. In 1917, though, he was the president of the American Medical Association. He had some thoughts on the role that doctors and the medical profession could play in World War I.

The benefit to our country after the present war in having some thousands of medical officers trained in sanitation, hygiene, and the prevention of disease will be incalculable. Through lax examinations of recruits and the natural effects of prolonged living and overcrowding in trenches and underground structures, tuberculosis will become a menace to our soldiers, as it is today in France.

The present war is one of remarkable proportions, and the medical service has assumed an importance such as it never had before. The old army hospital gangrene is a thing of the past. A knowledge of the care of infections, prevention of tetanus, vaccination for smallpox and typhoid, the cause and prevention of typhus, the old camp fever, also cholera, the plague, and fevers of all sorts, including the new trench form, is a training requirement of the army medical officers, and results in the restoration to duty of a high percentage of the injured.

Fortunately, smallpox has been eradicated from the earth. Other suggestions that Mayo mentioned in the article, such as changing the age at which an M.D. is received from 29 to 25 because “death overtakes the average physician at the age of fifty-eight” have not quite come to pass.

Part Played by Doctors in Time of World War: Dr. Charles H. Mayo’s Address on Country’s Educational Requirements, Prohibition, and Need of Physician in the Cabinet

From Sunday, June 10, 1917