"The flowering of modern medicine in antebellum Kentucky, the early and important leadership of Lexington in American medical education, and the quest for legitimacy of the medical profession through participation in local and national medical societies are portrayed through a study of local medial societies in Lexington, Kentucky.  In this innovative study, Dr. Mayo shows how the Lexington-Fayette County Medical Society served the needs and ambitions of physicians in an important center of early nineteenth century culture and learning, and how personal conflicts between physicians, epidemics, wars, financial panics, and technological change contributed to the decline and revival of the Lexington medical community.

Dr. Mayo's access to the archives, his superb insists, and his respect for his subject contribute a new and vivid perspective on the role of the local society in American medicine."

"Dr. Porter Mayo, a native of Prestonsburg, Kentucky, attended Eastern Kentucky University and Vanderbilt University and graduated from the University of Louisville Medical School in 1946.  He served in the U.S. Navy, and after receiving the M.S. degree in physiology from the University of Michigan School of Medicine, where he did respiratory physiology research, he took a general surgery residency in the V.A. Hospital, in Louisville and later a thoracic surgery residency at the University of Michigan.

His surgery practice in Lexington, Kentucky extended from 1954 to 1984, after which he pursued a second career and received a Ph.D. degree in history from the University of Kentucky.

He has served as Clinical Professor of Surgery and Director of the Problem-Based-Learning Program in the Department of surgery at UK Medical Center and Professor Emeritus, College of Medicine, University of Kentucky.  A Founding Member of both the Southern Thoracic Surgical Society and the Society of Thoracic Surgery, he has co-authored eighty scientific publications.

Dr. Mayo now devotes his writing to the history of medicine."