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8th Meeting of the European Society for Sexual Medicine
Copenhagen, 4 - 7 December 2005

Petter Hedlund

Chairman of the 8th Annual Congress of the ESSM
Chairman of the Scientific Committee of the ESSM

During the 8th Annual Meeting of the ESSM in Copenhagen, more than 1600 registered visitors enjoyed an exciting scientific program that was running daily in 4 parallel sessions. We had over 400 submitted abstracts of which a large majority was accepted for podium or poster sessions. With this tremendous original scientific interest for the ESSM 2005, we had to substantially increase the number of free presentations during the meeting. In the renewed educational program, the number of courses was also increased and novel topics were introduced. Based on the summary made from participants evaluation forms, instructional and postgraduate courses were well attended and were found to be very valuable sessions of high quality. In previous meetings, the interactive sessions have been successful and appreciated components of the scientific program. This was also the case in Copenhagen where 4 separate 90 minutes interactive sessions again received great interest from the Congress participants.

After evaluations in the Scientific Committee, it was a great pleasure to honor the prestigious ESSM Award of Scientific Excellence to Dr Eckhard W Hauck for his work in the field of Peyronie’s Disease, and to Dr Javier Angulo for his contributions in the field of male and female sexual physiology and pharmacology. Their award-associated master lectures were outstanding. A Career Award was given to Professor Karl-Erik Andersson for his extensive contributions to the field of sexual medicine.

During a conference holding an extensive scientific schedule, time may be limited to attend all sessions of interest and in a new initiatives of the ESSM from the Meeting in Denmark, video recordings of all instructional courses, master lectures, and many of the other sessions were performed, have been edited, and are available to experience on the ESSM website. In addition, to allow participants the time to again take part of posters that were presented in Copenhagen, a CD has been produced and will be distributed. Neither of these initiatives would have been possible without the generous contributions from the speakers and authors of the presented materials and I would again like to express my sincere gratitude to you all.

A main event in Copenhagen was of course the 10 Year Anniversary Celebration of the ESSM and I think that none of us will forget the beautiful atmosphere of Tivoli from the Tuesday Gala Reception. Remembering through the years since 1995 how our Society has progressed in scientific, clinical, educational and informational contributions within sexual medicine, this evening among ESSM friends and colleagues was a special and joyful moment. I am confident that the next 10 years will be at least equally inspiring.