Can you do harm surgically? Oh, yes, we could. Surgical errors do happen either by oversight or by mistake. What is oversight? An act of omission or an act of commission. An act of omission is where a surgeon does not recognize something that was present during the operation. Oversight. The eye does not see what the mind does not know. So a particular surgeon was not wise or knowledgeable enough to pick up something which he should have picked up. An act of omission. An is, either by choice or by accident, something which did not need to be touched, got touched.