The fraternity of strangers

Abstract

I greet you on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the founding of The Society of Head and Neck Surgeons. Over the past 30 years, we have united in a bond of kinship as we have faced the peril of cancer of the head and neck as our common foe. It was this feeling of kinship that struck me when I first attended a meeting of this Society. I found myself surrounded by a diverse group who shared a similar heritage and was actively combating this common peril. I never failed to gain strength from the enrichment and affirmation that I found there. All the while, I was reminded of a passage from Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables: “Great perils have this beauty, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers.” We are duty bound to honor these men of foresight who first conceived of this Society and brought us together for the purpose of organizing the battle against head and neck cancer. Let us now reminisce in our mature years on how we understand it all began. The undisputed father of head and neck surgery is Dr. Hayes Martin of the Memorial Hospital for Cancer and Allied Diseases in New York. It is not Dr. Theodore Kocher, who did the first upper neck dissection in the 1880s; it is not Dr. George Crile of Cleveland, who systematically planned and performed the first radical neck dissection in the early part of this century; nor is it Dr. Grant Ward of Baltimore, who did the first composite resection for cancer in 1932 and wrote the first comprehensive textbook of head and neck surgery in 1950. Hayes Martin is the father of head and neck surgery because he developed the discipline and produced the disciples who went out to teach and develop their own succeeding generations. And all the while, they were refining the management of the head and neck tumor patient. Along the way, it became apparent to Dr.