Department Blog
Dr. Joe Martinez and Dr. Adam Geroff published a clinical image and patient vignette about Sister Mary Joseph’s nodule in the Visual Diagnosis column of the January issue of The Journal of Emergency Medicine. Sister Mary Joseph (Julia) Dempsey, a surgical assistant at St. Mary's Hospital in Rochester, Minnesota, at the turn of the 19th century, brought this ominous indication of abdominal cancer to the attention of Dr. William Mayo, who published a paper about it in 1928. The eponym was first used, posthumously for Sister Mary Joseph, by Dr. Hamilton Bailey, in a book chapter published in 1949.