Science Quote by William J. Mayo

Perfection is the first red flag, and repetition is the second. Mayo’s line lands because it refuses the comforting myth that expertise looks like flawless certainty. In medicine - especially in the early 20th century, when surgery was rapidly professionalizing and reputations could harden into near-mystical authority - the “man who never makes a mistake” is not a saint but a danger. He’s either lying, hiding errors behind hierarchy, or practicing so cautiously that he’s not learning. The prayerful “Lord, deliver me” is doing sly work: it frames the request as humility while quietly indicting ego, institutional secrecy, and the kind of prestige that turns fallibility into taboo.

The second half tightens the moral logic. Mayo doesn’t romanticize error as “growth”; he draws a line between inevitable mistakes and negligent ones. The “same mistake twice” points to systems as much as individuals: poor recordkeeping, weak feedback loops, and cultures where juniors can’t challenge seniors. Coming from a scientist-physician, it also reads as an early argument for what we’d now call continuous improvement: you earn trust not by being error-free, but by being corrigible.

The quote’s intent is pragmatic, almost surgical: choose colleagues who can admit error, learn fast, and build habits that keep yesterday’s failure from becoming tomorrow’s routine. It’s a warning against two temptations in any high-stakes field: the performance of infallibility and the complacency of unexamined repetition.