Dr Seow Choen

Dr Francis Seow is a general surgeon at Mount Elizabeth Hospital, Singapore.

His specialty is colorectal surgery.

Dr Seow was a surgeon at the Singapore General Hospital, where he helped establish the earliest colorectal surgery department in Asia which offers patients up-to-date surgical techniques.

He graduated from the National University of Singapore, and subsequently subspecialised in colorectal surgery and worked at St Mark’s Hospital, UK. At that time, there were no specialised departments of colorectal surgery in this part of the world, and he decided to return to Singapore to do his part.

Dr Seow was awarded the earliest American Society of Colon and Rectal Surgeons’ international travelling fellowship. He was invited as the W Wallace Green lecturer for the St Luke’s Hospital Foundation in USA to lecture on the treatment of rectal cancer and the use of the colonic pouch. He was also the earliest Asian to be invited as the ESR Hughes lecturer for the Royal Australian College of Surgeons, the earliest Asian to be the Rupert B Turnbull Memorial lecturer for the Cleveland Clinic, USA, and the earliest Asian to be invited as the Philip Gordon lecturer for the Canadian Colorectal Society.

He was conferred a honorary life member of the Colorectal Surgical Society of Australia and honorary member of the Section of Colon and Rectal Surgery, Royal Australasian College of Surgeons. He was also a member of honour by the Israel Society of Colon and Rectal Surgeons. Dr Seow sits on several editorial boards of journals and has published 39 chapters in surgical textbooks and more than 261 articles in peer-reviewed surgical journals.

Dr Seow had also taken an interest in the development of colorectal surgery in Asia. He is frequently invited to lecture and to demonstrate surgery all around the world. He is frequently consulted by surgeons from all over the world on difficult cases as to the best method of handling these. He was the founding and current president of the Asian Federation of Coloproctology and the president of the Society of Colorectal Surgeons of Singapore. He is the founding and current president of the Eurasian (European-Asian) Colorectal Technology Association.

He received the Excellence for Singapore Award for his achievements in the field of coloproctology.