The Craft of Surgery. 2 vol. Edited by Philip Cooper. 1,510 pp, 1,040 illus. $42.50. Little, Brown & Co.. 34 Beacon St, Boston 6, 1964
It is highly improbable that a truly definitive atlas of surgical technique will ever be available to the practicing surgeon; nor is this a particularly lamentable deficit. It is to be expected that while a basic and unified approach to many surgical problems has evolved, the details and niceties of most general operative procedures have an infinite variety of refinements, far too numerous to be encompassed by a single text. Consequently, books on the art and craft of surgery are rarely competitive but rather are complementary. And so it is with two recently published texts, one written by Madden and the other edited by Cooper.
Madden's Atlas of Technics in Surgery is an expanded two-volume second edition of a highly successful text which first appeared in 1958 as a single tome. Each procedure illustrated is depicted by the artist as the author performs it. One virtue of this type of