The Spring Meeting was an annual meeting organized by the American College of Surgeons from the early 1970s until the late 2000s as part of the College’s efforts to emphasize its support for general surgery. The meeting was intended to provide participants with an enhanced understanding of the many facets of surgical care that can be used to elevate the standards of general surgical practice and improve patient care.i
The Spring Meeting itself grew out of sectional meetings that the ACS had been organizing since 1920. Sectional meetings were smaller, more regionalized meetings for the purpose of "promoting within each individual state and province the purposes for which the College was founded." Each section held an annual session from two to three days at a time and place determined by its executive committee. The sectional meetings included surgical diagnostic clinics, clinical demonstrations, and literary papers relating to the art and science of surgery.ii At the June 1971 Board of Regents Meeting the decision was made to substitute one large spring meeting for the three sectional meetings that were being held. The main reasons for this were due to declining attendance and increased costs to put on multiple sectional meetings a year.iii
The first Spring Meeting took place from April 1-3, 1973 in New York City. Utilizing material from the College’s Surgical Education and Self-Assessment Program (SESAP) the ACS put on a program that included eight postgraduate courses, each formulated on subject areas providing the basis for SESAP and included plenary sessions and small workshops for discussion. In addition to the postgraduate courses, two days of panels and symposia were scheduled, along with motion picture exhibitions, Cine Clinics, and commercial exhibits.iv
For more than three decades, the Spring Meeting served its intended purposes very well. However, by the mid-2000s, it became increasingly difficult for surgeons in all specialties to take extended periods of time away from their practices to attend meetings. In response, by the early 2000s the College presented the Spring Meeting in conjunction with the annual meeting of the Society of American Gastrointestinal Endoscopic Surgery, creating the “Surgical Spring Week.” The idea behind this format was that general surgeons could participate in multiple continuing education programs without traveling from one site to another.v The 35th and final Spring meeting took place in Las Vegas in April 2007.
From 2008 onwards certain programs and courses, such as the Excelsior Surgical Society Lecture and some postgraduate courses, that had been held at the Spring Meeting were included in the College’s Clinical Congress schedule. This meant important content and programming was not lost due to the termination of the Spring Meeting.
