Preface to the First Edition

The Mastery of Colorectal Surgery textbook is a two-volume compendium that demonstrates virtually all of the currently employed techniques for abdominal and anorectal surgery. All of the chapters have been written by internationally acclaimed experts, each of whom was given literary license to allow the book to be more creative and less rigorously formatted. Although some techniques are self-explanatory and the authors therefore concentrated their verbiage upon results and controversies surrounding a particular technique, other procedures are described in a more algorithmic manner. Specifically, some techniques require a much more heavily weighted description of preoperative and/or postoperative parameters rather than intraoperative variables. The matching of illustrations and videos has also been tailored to suit the needs of each chapter. Because of the quantity of material, the book is divided into two volumes: one that includes the abdominal and one that includes anorectal procedures. While many textbooks vie for the attention of surgeons in training and surgeons in practice, the Mastery series, edited by Dr. Josef Fischer, has established itself as the resource for expert management of each theme. Therefore, this book was deliberately crafted to augment rather than to replace several other excellent recently published textbooks. It is our hope that these volumes be used in that context so that the reader can learn the fundamentals and basics using many other excellent source materials and then rely upon the Mastery of Colorectal Surgery books for more clarity in terms of review of very specific procedures. In that same manner, these books perform a ready preoperative resource before embarking upon individual procedures.

We wish to thank Josef Fischer for having entrusted us with this latest of his literary offspring. The project took a considerable amount of time and effort, and we certainly thank him for his patience. In addition, we thank our respective staff in Weston and in Saint Louis, especially Liz Nordike, Heather Dean, Dr. Fabio Potenti, and Debbie Holton for their extensive efforts as well as Nicole Dernoski at Wolters Kluwer. We wish to express our sincerest and deepest gratitude to each and every contributor for their time, attention, expertise, and commitment to the project. Without our individual chapter authors, this work would not exist. We know that each of them has many significant competing obligations for their limited time and thank them for having participated to such an important degree in this project. Last, our appreciation goes to our families for their love and support as it is always time away from them that allows us to produce these type of books. In particular, appreciation goes to Linda Fleshman and to Wesley and Trevor Wexner.

Steven D. Wexner

James W. Fleshman