American Academy of Neurological Surgery (AANS), neurological surgery society
neurological surgery society
The AANS is dedicated to advancing the specialty of neurological surgery and promoting the highest quality of patient care. This extends to offering membership, educational resources, fellowships, and more to neurosurgeons and trainees outside of North America.
The integral role played by volunteer associations among the established scientific disciplines was never more clearly demonstrated than at the October 1919 meeting of the American College of Surgeons, at which neurological surgery was declared to exist as a surgical specialty. Those surgeons in attendance who were most interested in this work decided that formal meetings for the exchange of pertinent information should be arranged without delay. This phenomenon, common to all legitimate scientific disciplines, provided immediate reinforcement for the newest surgical specialties. It was a spontaneous and quite natural response for these surgeons to join together and seek fulfillment of common needs, which could be satisfied through group interaction. In the words of Harvey Cushing, who first envisioned this organized effort, the initial needs were to ". . . discuss our problems and compare results.. . ." Thus, a handful of surgeons committed themselves to pursue Cushing's suggestion, without thought to the fact that they were intuitively following a pattern, which, although not uncommon throughout the western world, has had a profound impact on sociopolitical development in the United States. With the decision to join together, they took the first steps to form a voluntary association in the country that has long been referred to as "the nation of associations," a social phenomenon that has led to the existence of a gigantic complex of volunteer institutions that perform many of the functions that are strictly reserved for the government elsewhere in the world.
Years passed before neurological surgery showed all the essential elements of an established surgical specialty: 1) recognition by the American Medical Association in 1937 of a system of formal postdoctoral education unique to the specialty, 2) establishment of the American Board of Neurological Surgery in 1940, and 3) proliferation of residency programs after World War II. In contrast, the development of the association structure was rapid and, not unlike those individuals who made up its nucleus, forceful.