In 1945, a group of ACS-affiliated surgeons gathered in the Excelsior Hotel in Rome, Italy, for the first-ever meeting of the Excelsior Surgical Society, the ACS’s military chapter. Their keynote speaker was Edward D. Churchill, MD, FACS, a renowned surgeon and World War II-era US Army consultant. With his successful speech, a tradition—the annual Churchill Lecture—was born.
Today, starting at 9:45 am, in Room 104ABC, M. Margaret “Peggy” Knudson, MD, FACS, will continue that tradition with a talk titled Service, Synergy, and Surgical Mythology.
Dr. Knudson is a trauma surgeon at the University of California, San Francisco and San Francisco General Hospital. She has served as a visiting surgeon at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, and Balad Air Force Theater Hospital in Iraq, and has provided other surgical services with the US military since 2003. From 2015 until mid-2023, she was the Medical Director of the Military Health System Strategic Partnership−ACS (MHSSPACS), which facilitates collaborations between the ACS and US military to augment educational opportunities, systems-based practices, and research capabilities in surgery.
In an interview, Dr. Knudson explained the meaning of each word in the lecture title.
Service is straightforward: “I will include some of my experiences with the US military over the past 20 years.”
Synergy, meanwhile, is about “the synergy between military and civilian surgeons as we work together to overcome the ‘peacetime effect’ of lessons lost between conflicts,” including the MHSSPACS’s Military Clinical Readiness Curriculum (also known as the “mCurriculum”), which helps ensure that combat casualty teams always remain ready for deployment.
Dr. Knudson noted that the concept of readiness and resulting curricula are relevant for civilian surgeons as well: “We feel that civilian surgeons will also benefit from the mCurriculum, as we all must be prepared to care for the injured, be it during conflicts, mass casualty events, or natural disasters.”
Finally, surgical mythology, Dr. Knudson says, refers to “some myths about military surgery in particular and trauma surgery in general, as we tend to accept some methods of treatment of the injured that are not always based in science.”
Dr. Knudson, who is the second female surgeon to deliver the Churchill Lecture, also said, “This is a very important year for the Churchill Lecture and the Excelsior Surgical Society,” as the group is reprinting Dr. Churchill’s book about his experiences as a surgeon during World War II, Surgeon to Soldiers.
The Excelsior Surgical Society offers a way for all surgeons with military backgrounds to experience camaraderie within and contribute their voices to the ACS. It is open to all active and veteran service members, as well as other ACS Members with an interest in the military. The mCurriculum is freely available to all at facs.org/mcurriculum.
