Top Knife. the Art and Craft of Trauma Surgery

Description

This book will help you take a badly wounded patient to the operating room, organize yourself and your team, do battle with some vicious injuries and come out with the best possible result. It is a practical guide to operative trauma surgery for residents and registrars, for general surgeons with an interest in trauma, and for isolated surgeons operating on wounded patients in military, rural or humanitarian settings. A surgical atlas may show you what to do with your hands - but not how to think, plan and improvise. Here you will find practical advice on how to use your head as well as your hands when operating on a massively bleeding trauma patient.

The first part of this book presents some general principles of trauma surgery. The second part is about trauma surgery as a contact sport. Here we show you how to deal with specific injuries to the abdomen, chest, neck and peripheral vessels. The single most important lesson we hope you will derive from this book is to always keep it simple - because, in trauma surgery, the simple stuff works.

Operative trauma surgery is a key element of surgical training world-wide, but many surgical trainees have only limited exposure to it throughout their training. The aim of this book is to provide a detailed technical guide for trauma surgery by two experienced surgical educators who are experts in the field. The original concept behind this text (compared to other operative surgery texts) is a special emphasis on intra-operative judgement, decision-making, and thought processes, as well as technical 'tips and tricks'. The book will be generously illustrated with black-and-white line drawings, but will NOT be a surgical atlas, because there will not be a step-by-step sequence of illustrations for each procedure. The illustrations will be incorporated into the text rather than appearing on separate pages. As such, the book will be an 'operative surgery' book, along the lines of such British classics as Peter Jones' 'Emergency Abdominal Surgery', Hugh Dudley's editions of 'Hamilton Bailey's Emergency Surgery' and Keen's 'Operative Surgery and Management'.