Handpicked, deliberately small, and considerably less serious than the crest suggests.
Everyone here was chosen. That is the whole of the membership process, and it is the only thing about this Society that is genuinely strict.
Physicians in active practice across Southern California, at the top of their fields. Chiefs of service and department leadership. Surgeons who take referrals from other surgeons. Practice owners and founders. A national champion of something unrelated to medicine. Between them the membership covers most of the specialties a person could need, which turns out to matter far more than anyone intended when the group was formed.
The common thread is not credentials. Plenty of accomplished physicians would not fit here. The thread is that every man in the room is someone the rest of the room is glad to see walk in.
Dinners. Mixers. A watch party for anything worth watching, and a few things that were not. Trips. Games. An enormous amount of nonsense in the group chat, most of it at somebody’s expense, none of it forwarded from anywhere.
There is very little education in it. Every so often a member who genuinely knows something will hold forth for twenty minutes and the room will get quiet, and that is worth more than a year of formal programming. But it is not why anyone comes, and pretending otherwise would be the fastest way to kill the thing.
Short, and the reason the group has held together.
Gatherings are for members. No spouses, no children, no visiting colleagues, no one’s cousin who is thinking about medical school. Part of the value of the room is a function of who is not in it.
Fieldwork is the exception, for reasons that are obvious.
Loosely, and by a handful of members who make things happen. One founder, who decides who is in it. A few others who moderate, organise, book the rooms, and chase the group when it goes quiet. No committees, no bylaws, no minutes, and no plans to acquire any.
The founder holds no medical licence and no clinical privileges. He holds every phone number, which has proven the more useful credential.