Annual Scientific Meeting

Nearly eighty years in service of the specialty.

The Piedmont Society of Colon & Rectal Surgeons was founded on June 3, 1949, when Drs. Ross Deeds and J. Milton Stockman — then in attendance at the 50th annual meeting of the American Proctologic Society — gathered with a dozen colleagues and resolved to organize a regional society of their own.

The Society’s first official meeting was held the following July in Asheville, North Carolina. Its reach has grown from the Carolinas, Virginia, Georgia, and eastern Tennessee to the broader Southeast, and in 1976 it adopted its present name.

Stockman insisted on three things from the start, and all three are still kept.

Family. Bring children, bring parents, bring guests.

Informality in the science itself. A meeting where students and surgical residents can present, and the person asking the first question is a surgeon whose papers they read in training. It means the discussion is where the value is — and you can say “I don’t know,” and the room leans in rather than away.

Hospitality. Always a room to gather in, because the informal hours are the glue that holds the other two together.

If you practice in the specialty — or are training for it — there is a place for you at this table. Membership is open to any surgeon who wishes to carry the tradition forward, and if you have never attended a meeting, come and see what eighty years of hospitality looks like in person.

It is worth noting that this history is known to us through the foresight of Richard Saleeby, our longtime secretary-treasurer — whose lectureship is given by our annual invited professor.

Under the leadership of President Kelly Finan, MD and Program Director William Kethman, MD, the Society continues the tradition its founders established more than seventy-five years ago. Presidents & lectureships, year by year →