Historians Corner
Behrooz A. Akbarnia, MD
Past SRS Historian 2011-2015
In October, our Society had the privilege to celebrate its 50th Anniversary of the Annual Meeting & Course in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the city of our founding. It was wonderful to see all of you who were able to make it to the meeting and take part. To those of you who weren’t able to make it, your presence was truly missed. We had the honor of having three of our nine surviving Founding Fellows and 30 of our Past Presidents in attendance.
There were many ways in which the 50th Anniversary was celebrated during the meeting including a museum, Living Legends presentations and a video that was orchestrated by the 50th Anniversary Task Force and Historical Committee.
The museum was the largest undertaking of this celebration. Countless hours were spent on the researching, designing and organizing of the museum. While we were not able to include all suggestions, a very good overview of the last 50 years was given.
Within the museum, daily Living Legends presentations were given. Meeting attendees had the opportunity to listen and ask questions to John E. Lonstein, MD; Jean Dubousset, MD; Se-Il Suk, MD; Jesse H. Dickson, MD; Donald P.K. Chan, MD; Marc A. Asher, MD; Kiyoshi Kaneda, MD; John P. Kostuik, MD and Nobumasa Suzuki, MD. This was an opportunity that many took advantage of and for those of you who missed out, the videos of these sessions will be posted to the SRS Archives website in early 2016.
The 50th Anniversary Video was created to celebrate the origins of our Society; where we have come since 1966 and where are we going. Please visit the meeting video archives to view this wonderful video, http://srs.gmetonline.com/ViewPresentation.aspx?subscriptionpackageid=12.
I would like to thank all who were involved in the planning of this wonderful meeting for their time, dedication and passion for our Society.
Coming up next…
George H. Thompson, MD
SRS Historian 2016-2018
As your new Historian, I will be working with the Historical Committee to continue to preserve our rich history. There are a few major projects on the horizon that will help bring our history to life. The first, is a virtual tour of the museum that was created for the 50th Annual Meeting. Everyone will be able to “take a walk” through the full museum that was on display in Minneapolis. The tentative release day for this is February 1, 2016.
In addition to the virtual tour, all of the items from the museum timeline will be made into a timeline on the website. This is going to be an ongoing process in which we continue to expand the number of items on the timeline. Once the timeline is posted, please send suggested additions to SRS staff liaison, Ashtin at [email protected].
We will also be continuing to collect video interviews of SRS Past Presidents and other greats in the field of spine deformity.
I’d also like to remind everyone about our Society’s physical archives housed at University of Kansas Medical Center. Any book, document, device or other historical artifact needs to be preserved and documented. I urge you to contribute to the Archives Endowment or donate artifacts to the Archives. Please contact Ashtin at [email protected], for any questions about the items you have and wish to donate to the archives. I also highly encourage all of our members to visit the SRS and Harrington Archives at KU, it is a fantastic opportunity to see the history of our Society up close.
Chair: George H. Thompson, MD Committee: Behrooz A. Akbarnia, MD; Jason E. Lowenstein, MD; Terry D. Amaral, MD; Alejo Vernengo-Lezica, MD; Patricia N. Kostial, BSN, RN; Jay Shapiro, MD; Hani Mhaidli, MD, PhD