About SIG

History of SIG

The George Sheldon Society Surgery Interest Group traces its roots to the year 1999.  The society was founded in honor of the academic achievements and contributions to surgery as a profession by one of the University of North Carolina School of Medicine's distinguished faculty, Dr. George Sheldon (see biography below).   It was founded with the intent of fostering both extracurricular interest and education in surgery and the surgical specialties in medical students of the first and second years.  Interestingly, this was contemporary with a movement in the late 1990s by the major surgical societies in the United States, e.g. the American College of Surgeons, to find a way to bridge the gap between surgery and medical students of the first and second years who are interested in surgery, but are distanced from it until their clerkship.  The foundation of groups like the George Sheldon Society Surgery Interest Group has now become a pervasive means of accomplishing this end, with surgery interest groups being established at many major U.S. medical schools.

About Dr. George Sheldon

George F. Sheldon, MD, FACS, FRCS Edin (Hon), FRCS Eng (Hon)
Professor of Surgery and Social Medicine
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Dr. Sheldon, a graduate of the University of Kansas School of Medicine, was Fellow in Internal Medicine at the Mayo Clinic, Resident in Surgery at the University of California-San Francisco, and Fellow in Surgical Biology at Harvard Medical School. He was Professor of Surgery and Chief of the Trauma Service at the University of California-San Francisco prior to becoming the Zack D. Owens Professor and Chairman (1984-2001) of the Department of Surgery at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

Dr. Sheldon is one of fewer than twenty surgeons in the past 100 years to be president of all of the major surgical organizations, including President of the American College of Surgeons, President of the American Surgical Association, President of the American Association for the Surgery of Trauma, and Chair of the American Board of Surgery. He is the first non-Dean surgeon, to be Chairman of the Association of American Medical Colleges since 1879. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Science. He was a Charter Member of the Council on Graduate Medical Education (COGME) when it was founded in 1985 under the Department of Health and Human Services. Dr. Sheldon holds Honorary Fellowships in the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, the Royal College of Surgeons of England, the Association of Surgeons of Great Britain and Ireland, the European Surgical Association, the British Columbia Surgical Association, and the Colombian Surgical Association. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Society of Black Academic Surgeons. He currently holds the position of Editor-in-Chief of e-FACS.org, the new web portal of the American College of Surgeons.