Robert Mayo (1784–1864), physician and author, was born in Powhatan County and studied at the College of William and Mary in 1803. After receiving a medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1808 with a dissertation on “the sensorium,” he spent time in Richmond and later in Philadelphia, where he wrote textbooks and practiced medicine. Returning to Richmond by 1821, Mayo published a short-lived newspaper, the Jackson Republican (1826–27). By 1830 he lived in Washington, where he held a postal clerkship and compiled The Pension Laws of the United States, including sundry Resolutions of Congress, from 1776 to 1833: Executed at the War Department (1838), and other works related to federal departments. Mayo eventually turned against Andrew Jackson, attacking his integrity in Political Sketches of Eight Years in Washington (1839). He died in Washington (Memorial Biographies of the New-England Historic Genealogical Society [1905], 6:48–52; William and Mary Provisional List description begins A Provisional List of Alumni, Grammar School Students, Members of the Faculty, and Members of the Board of Visitors of the College of William and Mary in Virginia. From 1693 to 1888, 1941 description ends , 28; Will J. Maxwell, comp., General Alumni Catalogue of the University of Pennsylvania [1917], 568; Kite’s Philadelphia Directory for 1814 [Philadelphia, 1814]; Jackson, Papers description begins Sam B. Smith, Harold D. Moser, Daniel Feller, and others, eds., The Papers of Andrew Jackson, 1980– , 10 vols. description ends , 8:643–7, 9:283–6; Washington Daily National Intelligencer, 17 Oct. 1864).