The World Congresses of Anaesthesiologists

Abstract

The World Congresses of the WFSA provide significant milestones around which the organisation has evolved. The meeting in Scheveningen, in The Netherlands, in 1955, at which the WFSA was founded, is rightly regarded as the first WFSA World Congress of Anaesthesiologists, since this was the first time Societies of Anaesthesiologists from various countries sent individuals as official delegates to a world-wide meeting of anaesthesiologists. The events leading up to this historic occasion have been well documented by M. Mauve (The Netherlands) Fig. 1, a member of the original Interim Committee that created WFSA. There were 26 founding societies of WFSA and these are shown in Table 1. The United States did not feel the time was right for their society to join WFSA and the reasons behind this decision are described by Papper and Bacon (see Chapter 3). However, Dr. Oscar O.R. Schwidetsky from the United States made two generous donations because he felt that the work being done was worthy of American support [2].