DOG 2020 Welcome Address
Ladies and gentlemen, dear colleagues,
2020 is a special year for us, and it is my pleasure to invite you to the 118th Conference of the German Society of Ophthalmology, which will be held at the Estrel Hotel in Berlin on October 8th through 11th, 2020.
Throughout the year, we will honor our Society’s founder Albrecht von Graefe as 2020 is the 150th anniversary of his death. Our annual conference will be the highlight of these celebrations. An exceptional figure and pioneering innovator, Albrecht von Graefe certainly would take great delight in the ways our discipline has developed. He was also a pointed critic of erroneous trends, a man who fought for his convictions, and was committed to establishing ophthalmology as a discipline in its own right. Outstanding as a teacher, he always focused on his patients’ wellbeing and placed particular significance on the correct diagnosis. We should follow his example, commit ourselves to excellence in ophthalmological research and education, make our patients’ health the main priority in everything we do and fight against negative developments that threaten these objectives.
To this end, DOG 2020 will focus on values as significant today as they were at the time our organization was founded. Therefore, we will not only honor von Graefe with an excursion to key stations of his life and work in Berlin but also direct our attention to the conflict areas that make living his values so difficult in our current political and societal environment.
The year 2020 also stands for the WHO initiative Vision 2020 – the Right to Sight, launched in 1999 with the mission to eliminate the main causes for avoidable blindness.
I am therefore delighted to announce that our DOG Conference 2020 will be the first to be held as joint meeting with the International Society of Ocular Trauma (ISOT). The joint meeting will start with ISOT’s scientific conference program in Halle and continue with DOG’s symposiums and lectures on Wednesday and Thursday at Estrel Hotel Berlin.
DOG 2020 will again feature popular and compelling formats we introduced in previous years, including DOG Update and DOG Kontrovers. Numerous fascinating symposiums, research presentations, poster sessions and seminars complement the program.
For the first time in 2020 there will be a spring and an autumn FEBO exam. The spring examination will take place in May in Paris, the autumn examination will take place during the DOG congress. We are pleased to offer our international guests even more English-language formats, including the new DOG International Expert Day and a day-long program with interactive update and review sessions, designed to make our conference more attractive for international experts. We hope to see you in Berlin!
Which brings me back to Albrecht von Graefe, who wanted to bring all ophthalmologists together. His self-proclaimed ambition was to facilitate professional exchange and widen horizons, but also to strengthen professional friendships across borders so that we may share successes but also failures.
In this spirit, I hope to see all of you at DOG 2020 in Berlin.
Yours sincerely,
Hans Hoerauf
President
