Definition of General Surgery and General Surgeons
The General Surgeon is a Master Surgeon. A broad training ensures mastery in head and neck, breast, gastrointestinal, pediatric, oncologic and minimally invasive surgery while taking a leadership role in trauma and critical care. Further training permits the general surgeon to focus in areas of subspecialty interest. To function, every full service hospital requires general surgical presence. Being a core discipline, general surgery is vital to the training of medical students and all other surgical and some non surgical disciplines. It is from the ranks of general surgery that many of the leaders in surgery, education and research come.
Binding this truly diverse specialty is the general surgeon’s primacy in the management of acute surgical emergencies. Often complex, these pathologies are encountered in physiologically compromised patients requiring morbid but life saving procedures. The oldest of the surgical disciplines, general surgery continues to be the base upon which other surgical disciplines are built.
