Mayfield is best known for his clinical interests in peripheral nerve and spine injuries, development of neurosurgical instruments, and medical politics.
He obtained his undergraduate degree from the University of North Carolina and planned for a career in public health until neurosurgery caught his interest.
Upon completion of residency in 1935, he served as a graduate fellow and instructor at the University of Louisville under Roy Glenwood Spurling.
Mayfield was about to return home when Sister Theodora offered him a position to start neurosurgery services at Good Samaritan Hospital.
Within a year Mayfield had so many patients that he was often working 90 hours a week, with 7 to 8 cases a day and frequent late-night trips to rural hospitals.
Mayfield wrote numerous papers and a book about the treatment of causalgia (intense pain resulting from wounds to peripheral nerves) with surgical sympathectomy.
[2] In the national arena of organized medicine, Mayfield and his colleagues wisely perceived that the neurosurgical profession in America did not possess a unified voice.
As president of the Harvey Cushing Society, he addressed this issue by gathering his political forces and diplomatically making plans.
During his Presidential Address in 1965, he proclaimed that henceforth the Harvey Cushing Society would be the official voice of neurosurgery in the United States.
[3] Perhaps Frank Mayfield's greatest local political impact was his three-decade crusade to defuse the town versus gown conflicts between the university and its private hospital competitors.
Shortly after its invention, a California surgeon called in desperate hopes of securing the clips in time to use them during an upcoming operation on actress Patricia Neal.
Mayfield told the surgeon to contact the props man on the set of the TV show, Ben Casey, where their use had been featured in a recent[when?]
Charles Drake worked with Mayfield to develop a fenestrated clip through which the posterior cerebral artery could pass, thus facilitating occlusion of basilar terminus aneurysms.
The padded headrests were designed to cradle and stabilize the head off the end of the operating table and allow the surgeon better access during surgery.
Subsequently, in 1973, the Mayfield three-pin skull clamp was designed to rigidly affix a patient's head to the operating table during craniotomy drilling and delicate microneurosurgery.