The Physiologic Basis of Surgery

O'Leary and Capote are to be congratulated on improving on what was already a project of grand design. When The Physiologic Basis of Surgery was first published in 1993, it was among a number of volumes issued to address the problem of fulfilling the Special Requirements for the training of residents in all aspects of basic surgical physiology. O'Leary's opus emerged as one of the finer volumes addressing this issue. The requirements have not changed since then and specifically demand that residents in surgery programs be instructed in the fundamentals of wound healing, hemostasis, oncology, shock, circulatory, respiratory, gastrointestinal and genitourinary physiology, microbiology, nutrition, fluid and electrolyte balance, the metabolic response to injury, musculoskeletal biomechanics, immunology and transplantation, and applied anatomy and pathology (American Medical Association. Graduate Medical Education Directory. Chicago, Ill: American Medical Association; 1996). Perhaps it is a sign of the times that the second edition has been