25 years of SMIT: the past, the present, and the future of minimally invasive therapy.

A quarter of a century has passed since the Society of Minimally Invasive Therapy (SMIT) was founded in 1989 with the aim to provide a platform to promote the development of minimally invasive therapy and the new instruments and devices needed to carry out the new surgical techniques. Both the founder of the society, British urologist John EA Wickham, and the German surgeon Gerhard F Buess, who was one of the leading members from the beginning, conceived SMIT as an interdisciplinary forum to promote the cooperation between physicians from various surgical specialties, but also medical engineers, resp. medical device manufacturers, whose expertise was needed to build the instruments that had to be developed to carry out the new concept of surgery. In this paper we outline the history of SMIT over the past 25 years in order to highlight both the ideas behind the society and the dedication of the people who shaped it.