Plastic Surgery, 3rd Edition: Volume Four. Lower Extremity, Trunk, and Burns

As a service to our readers, Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery® reviews books, DVDs, practice management software, and electronic media items of educational interest to reconstructive and aesthetic surgeons. All items are copyrighted and available commercially. The Journal actively solicits information in digital format (e.g., CD-ROM and Internet offerings) for review. Reviewers are selected on the basis of relevant interest. Reviews are solely the opinion of the reviewer; they are usually published as submitted, with only copy editing. Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery® does not endorse or recommend any review so published. Send books, DVDs, and any other material for consideration to: Ronald P. Gruber, M.D., Review Editor, Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, UT Southwestern Medical Center, 5959 Harry Hines Boulevard, POB1, Suite 300, Dallas, Texas 75390-8820. Ronald P. Gruber, M.D. Review Editor The third edition of Plastic Surgery follows the first published in 1990. Yet this six-volume tome claims continuity from Converse’s 1977 Reconstructive Plastic Surgery (Second Edition), the iconic, red, seven-volume multiauthored work familiar to legions of “senior” plastic surgeons and board examiners. This review concerns Volume Four: the Lower Extremity, Trunk and Burns. The book is substantial, printed on high-quality silky semigloss with imposing color illustrations and clinical photographs, the former of an even, high quality; the latter, not so much. There are 525 pages of text, 203 pages of index, and 22 pages of contributors. The text includes 80 pages dedicated to anatomy (lower limb and torso), consisting of a large collection of Netter’s lavish color plates with appropriate descriptive and sporadic clinically relevant text. Nevertheless, the extraction of historical data and references has extensively pruned the book. The bibliophile can relax, however, because all this—together with videos and extra content—is available in the Web version, which leads me to ask why the anatomy could not have been similarly relegated and the whole edition shortened by a volume or two. That aside, the subjects have been comprehensively covered and, indeed, illustrated. As a multiauthored text, one might expect uneven chapter quality, but this is not so. Tight editing has kept things on an even keel, and while some sections are less well illustrated than others, the overall impression is of an authoritative and wide-ranging work. There is room for improvement, however. I would like to see some diagrams regarding the vaginoplasty, the urethral flap, and the construction of a neoclitoris from the glans penis described in “Surgery for Identity Disorder.” (I presume this means gender identity disorder: I would hate to think we had an operation for someone simply claiming to be the Queen of Sheba.) It would help if the various authors gave an algorithmic rather than an encyclopedic account of their subject matter. For instance, we are informed of several procedures for the treatment of lymphedema but we get no feel for which to use in what circumstance, or what the current approach to the various conditions that make up this entity should be. This was a recurring complaint of Converse’s 1977 classic, relegating it, at times, to serve as the reference book for Grabb and Smith’s more readable and systematic companion. There are also some errors. For example, dissection of the reverse sural flap is described as being “distal to proximal” (page 146) when we know it to be quite the opposite. However, this is nitpicking. The multimedia component to this book clearly points to the future of medical publishing and perhaps its own nemesis. On the inside front cover, a scratchie reveals a code to gain online access to the book and the various extras. A reader owning all six volumes of Plastic Surgery could read them on an iPad, a device much smaller than the section in this volume devoted to just the index. In a purely online version, chapters could be updated periodically, the authors responding to new developments in addition to feedback from readers and reviewers. Perhaps the price could be significantly reduced because the reader would no longer need to possess his or her own personal Book of Kells. Surely it will not be long before the printed medical textbook becomes entirely redundant. In the meantime, I would recommend Plastic Surgery as a worthy successor to Converse’s 1977 Reconstructive Plastic Surgery. It is a must for every plastic surgery resident (who will undoubtedly pirate it) and should have a place of honor in all academic divisional and departmental libraries. J. Brian Boyd, F.R.C.S.