Christopher's Textbook of Surgery

Abstract

The ninth edition of Christopher's<i>Textbook of Surgery</i>represents a skillful evolution over a period of 32 years since the textbook first appeared. Few textbooks of surgery have enjoyed so long a life and have served so usefully as a reference textbook. The first few editions were too encyclopedic to serve adequately as a text for students, and too brief to serve well the encyclopedic needs of the surgeon in practice. With the death of Christopher, Davis revised the book, making it more useful to the student and the practitioner of surgery. The ninth edition contains many chapters not found in the first edition, and to compare the first and the ninth reminds one of the enormous advances that surgery has made during the lifetime of this text. For example, surgery of the liver and portal hypertension were not a subject to be found in the early editions, nor was