• Sharing Mayo Clinic

    What would Dr. Will and Dr. Charlie Tweet?

When we were discussing creation of the Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media last year, our Mayo Clinic chief administrative officer, Shirley Weis, said something that struck a chord with me.

We had been talking about some of the ways our Mayo Clinic YouTube channel had helped patients get information they needed, and Ms. Weis said, "You know, if they were alive today, I'll bet Dr. Will and Dr. Charlie would be using YouTube."

I think that's highly likely, especially given the Mayo brothers' outreach practices and their approach to innovation. Dr. Will and Dr. Charlie regularly traveled to other medical centers to share what they had discovered about surgical practices and also to learn from others. They didn't just travel within the U.S., but to Europe and elsewhere. And this was back when travel was much more arduous than it is today.

With the possibility of sharing in-depth information on a global scale without leaving home, I have no doubt that the Mayo brothers would have embraced YouTube. And I'll bet they would have tweeted, too.

The Mayo brothers were well known for the kind of pithy, incisive comments that would fit perfectly on Twitter. Many of those quotes were gathered in book format in 1951.

So during 2011, we're going to share a quote of the day from Dr. Will or Dr. Charlie (or occasionally from their father) via the Mayo Clinic Twitter account. We'll also be gathering these quotes here on Sharing Mayo Clinic, on the Mayo Brothers' Wisdom page.

In so doing, we hope to help renew appreciation for the timeless wisdom that helped to set the tone for what Mayo Clinic has become, while also answering the question that is the subject of this post.

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