A global need for improvement in the field of hand surgery was the outcome of low patient results during the Second World War. This fact was also registered by the Finnish surgical community, including K.E. Kallio, who, in 1950, was appointed professor of surgery at the University of Helsinki. Kallio began to systematically improve and modernize the treatment of hand injuries. He also encouraged and supported his colleague Kauko Solonen to become acquainted with the challenges facing hand surgery. In 1960, hand surgical operations were transferred from the Helsinki Surgical Hospital to the Töölö Hospital, where hand-specific surgery began in 1963 under the lead of Solonen. The operations decreased in 1967, when Solonen was transferred to Kotka, but re-emerged in 1969, when he was assigned to the Invalid Foundation Hospital in Helsinki. During the same year, a department of hand surgery was founded at the hospital, lead by Solonen. Until 1986, the Invalid Foundation Hospital was the sole location for education in the field of hand surgery. Further locations of training were introduced to the Tampere University Hospital by Simo Vilkki in 1987, contemporarily to Oulu by Timo Raatikainen and to Kuopio by Heikki Jaroma in 1989, and . Hand surgery was re-introduced to the University of Helsinki in 1995, when a department of hand surgery was established at the Töölö Hospital.
During the 1970’s, the development in both knowledge and skill of hand surgical techniques, especially microsurgery, added pressure to form a special field for hand surgery. Constant efforts and endless requests by hand surgeons resulted in the recognition of hand surgery as a specialist field on the 1st of September 1982. After the reforms of specialized doctor’s training in 1993, hand surgery maintained its status as an independent branch, which required an additional two years of training succeeding the six years of surgical training. After Finland became a member of the European Union, the number of specialist training fields in medicine was subdue to adaptations according to the EU regulations. Hand surgery as a specialist field was extremely close to losing its independent status, but, thanks to the efforts of active members of the Society for Surgery of Hand, hand surgery kept its independence from other specialized branches. Since 1999, Finland is the only EU member country where hand surgery is recognised as a specialist field and where the responsibility of training has been transferred to the universities. At the moment, only the University of Turku lacks a post for hand surgery.
Once hand surgery had been sustained, and as the number of orthopaedists practicing hand surgery had began to rise in the 1970’s, the establishment of a community responsible for passing knowledge, skill, and improvement in working conditions became inevitable. The Finnish Society for Surgery of Hand was officially established on the 7th of January 1976. The original members included Kauko Solonen (chairman), Henry Brummer, Georg Bakalim, Martti Vastamäki, and Simo Vilkki. The founding members continued to run the society for the following decade, after which the number of members increased vastly to a point, where the governing body was able to recruit younger members to the board and decide on the length of terms. The activity of the governing body and members (currently 97 members) has been acknowledged by e.g. Finland holding the Nordic (1988, 2000 and 2008) and International (IFSSH 1995) Hand Surgery conferences. In addition, our members have numerous confidential posts – both national and international – in surgical societies, and the society has also published the first Finnish contextual book on hand surgery. The society has throughout its existence aimed at spreading information on hand surgery to the Finnish Medical Association and it has done this by actively organizing its own program for the annual medical and surgical conventions, participating in conferences organized by the Finnish Orthopaedic Association, as well as by giving concise specialist training courses to hand surgeons.