At this moment - just as you pick up this book and begin to browse through its pages - there are many thousands of surgeons around the world facing a patient with an abdominal catastrophe. The platform on which such an encounter occurs differs from place to place - be it a modern emergency department in Nepal, a shabby casualty room in the Bronx, or a doctors tent in the African bush - but the scene itself is amazingly uniform. It is always the same: you confronting a patient, he - in pain, suffering and anxious. And you are anxious as well - anxious about the diagnosis,concerned about...