At this evening’s Convocation Ceremony, Marshall Z. Schwartz, MD, FACS, will receive the Distinguished Service Award—the ACS’s highest honor.
Dr. Schwartz, an emeritus surgeon-in-chief at St. Christopher's Hospital for Children in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, has exemplified the ideals that this award aims to recognize. Established by the Board of Regents (BoR) in 1957, the Distinguished Service Award honors a surgeon who has provided outstanding contributions to the ACS, in addition to embodying surgical ideals of ethical conduct and excellence in patient care.
Dr. Schwartz, a pediatric surgeon, called his lengthy involvement with the ACS “truly a labor of love.”
Longstanding Service
An ACS Fellow since 1982, Dr. Schwartz initially brought his expertise to the Advisory Council for Pediatric Surgery and Pediatric Surgical Forum. He served on the advisory council for many years in a variety of roles, including as a board member, representative of the surgical forum, Chair, and representative of the ACS BoR, and on the Surgical Forum as both a member and Chair.
In the early 1990s, Dr. Schwartz’s career in pediatric surgery led him to a role as surgeon-in-chief of Children’s National Hospital in Washington, DC, and he began to recognize the potential for the ACS to become more engaged in health policy and advocacy.
Dr. Schwartz became a member of the ACS Health Policy and Advocacy Group, and “I became the squeaky wheel,” he said. “I felt it was important that our government know our positive history in promoting patient surgical quality of care, access, and cost containment.”
He served on the Health Policy and Advocacy Group for many years and ascended to roles as Vice-Chair and later Chair. He shared that his proudest advocacy-related achievements included the fact that, with the excellent support and hard work of the ACS Division of Advocacy and Health Policy: “We gradually educated federal legislators on what the ACS did in the past and currently are doing. It took a while but fast forward, they call us now for advice on health policy.”
Leadership at the ACS and Beyond
Dr. Schwartz’s leadership extended to serving on many ACS committees, including Patient Education, Member Services, Finance, Investment, Honors, and Research and Optimal Patient Care. He has been Chair of the ACS Surgery Advisory Chairs and was a member of the BoR from 2009 to 2018, serving as its Vice-Chair from 2017 to 2018. A prolific researcher, he was an associate editor of the Journal of the American College of Surgeons from 1996 to 2023.
His leadership in academic surgery also is significant. In addition to his roles at Children’s National Hospital and St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children, he was surgeon-in-chief at the Child Health Center of The University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. Currently, he is a professor at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and conducting tissue engineering research at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine.
Dr. Schwartz also served as director of the American Board of Surgery, including as chair of the Pediatric Surgery Board, president of the American Pediatric Surgical Association, and a member of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education’s Residency Review Committee for Surgery.
As Dr. Schwartz prepared to receive an award capping his many years of service, he continued to advise the involvement of others with the ACS: “I was very vocal about young people joining the American College of Surgeons and getting involved in advocacy, because it's important. People have to know what we do and why we do it, and what the issues are that need to be fixed.”
Convocation will begin at 5:45 pm on the third level of McCormick Place West. The ceremony will be livestreamed and available on demand soon after its conclusion.
