Key, Jack D.

An inscription over the north entrance of what today is the Mayo Medical School Student Center reads “Non multa sed bona,” which translates to “Not many but good.” One might enjoy “a quickening of the homiletic pulse” while reflecting on the productive careers of surgeons William J. Mayo, Charles H. Mayo, Donald Guthrie, William L. Estes, Jr., and Harold L. Foss, their influences on each other and surgery in general, and the appropriateness of this Latin aphorism as a tribute to them and to what they as unique achievers accomplished in the practice of medicine—relatively few in numbers, but excellent.