The Core Textbook of Surgery represents a major contribution to medical students, interns, and beginning residents in surgery or medicine who are seeking an overview of the essential principles of surgery. The text discusses basic surgical principles in preoperative and postoperative care, anesthesia, wound healing, and complications. There are also chapters on cancer and on separate surgical subspeciality problems. It does not discuss surgical technique or detailed descriptions of current surgical procedures. Rather it concentrates on the essentials of surgical evaluation and management.
It does not document each statement, but it has a very well-annotated bibliography at the end of each chapter.
Evaluation of this text was difficult for a surgeon long since removed from his medical school days, and so I requested the opinion of a junior surgical resident. He found the book unique, as a concise source of basic concepts that would be difficult to glean from larger