Caring for the Heart: Mayo Clinic and the Rise of Specialization

This groundbreaking book describes developments in the diagnosis and treatment of heart disease, explains how the Mayo Clinic became a world-famous medical center, and reveals how new technologies and procedures promoted medical specialization. It is written for general readers as well as health care professionals, historians, and policy analysts.

W. Bruce Fye, M.D. retired recently as a consultant in the Division of Cardiovascular Diseases at Mayo Clinic. Born and raised in Pennsylvania, he received his undergraduate and medical degrees from Johns Hopkins, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and Alpha Omega Alpha. He completed a medical residency at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center in Manhattan before returning to Johns Hopkins for his cardiology fellowship. Selected as a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar, he also received a master's degree from the Institute of the History of Medicine at Hopkins.

In 1978, Dr. Fye joined the Marshfield Clinic in Wisconsin, where he established the echocardiography laboratory. He was chair of the Cardiology Department from 1981 to 1999 and was vice-chief of staff of St. Joseph's Hospital in Marshfield from 1991 to 1999. He joined the Cardiovascular Division of the Mayo Clinic in 2000. A Professor of Medicine and the History of Medicine, he was the founding Medical Director of the Mayo Clinic Center for the History of Medicine.

He is the author of more than 100 historical papers and two books, The Development of American Physiology: Scientific Medicine in the 19th Century (1987) and American Cardiology: The History of a Specialty and Its College (1996). Oxford University Press will publish his third book, Caring for the Heart: Mayo Clinic and the Rise of Specialization, early in 2015. Dr. Fye is a past president of the American College of Cardiology, the American Association for the History of Medicine, and the American Osler Society.

He met his wife Lois in high school, and they recently celebrated their 45th wedding anniversary. They have two daughters and two grandsons.