Travelling Surgical Society of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

The Travelling Surgical Society of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a group of surgeons from around the United Kingdom which travels to various hospitals and surgical departments around the world and in the UK. These are academic and clinical meetings and the purpose is to encourage educational and surgical exchanges.

In 1924 Sir Berkeley (later Lord) Moynihan held a clinical meeting in Leeds for twelve British surgeons whom he then entertained to dinner. From these roots evolved the present-day Travelling Surgical Society (TSS).

The current membership consists of about fifty surgeons of whom thirty are in active practice. The society has always maintained strong links to military surgery.

Five of the active members are Professors of Surgery, demonstrating that we place great emphasis on academic content in our meetings. We offer two travelling fellowships each year (details here).

In recent years members have held distinguished honours (two knights and a baron) as well as Presidencies and other leading roles with surgical Royal Colleges.

Recent membership has also boasted some unusual accolades, including an Honored Member of the American Association of Clinical Anatomists, a Lambeth Doctorate of Medicine (awarded by the Archbishop of Canterbury), a Kentucky Colonel, and a Chevalier de l’Ordre National du Merite. Our current membership even includes a Minister of Health to the last UK government.

"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness. Broad, whole some, charitable views cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth"

Mark Twain

"In our age such great usefulness redounds to the physician from his travels that none puts much faith in the authority of the physician who has not set foot outside his native land, and, although each may have at home in abundance those things which are necessary for medical instruction, nevertheless they ought to be strengthened or increased by a comparison with things abroad.

There is a vast delight and pleasure in gazing upon foreign lands and fields, mountains and rivers, observing the benignity of Nature's variety everywhere, the different conditions of the sick in homes and in hospitals with their great number of beds, which can readily be seen here and there, examining the methods for treating the patients, enjoying the conversation of the learned men, and calling forth their experiences, and visiting the laboratories, the furnaces of the chemists, the pharmacies and the unguent shops."

Thomas Bartholin, Danish anatomist (1616 -1680) on medical travel