About OpenSurgery
Eight surgical textbooks, condensed into 121 topics, plus two more the question bank draws on. Every clinical statement says which book and chapter it came from. The questions were taken from those books too, not written for this site.
How a page is put together
Disease topics all use the same eleven sections in the same order: Summary, Definition, Pathophysiology, Clinical features, Etiology, Diagnosis, Scoring and Severity, Treatment and Management, Surgeries, Complications, Prognosis. Topics about a procedure or about perioperative care swap in headings that fit what the books actually describe. Where the sources say nothing under a heading, the heading is dropped rather than padded out.
Nothing here is written from memory. Each fact was found in one of the reference books below, and the citation beside it names the chapter it came from.
The source textbooks
- Bailey & Love 28eBailey & Love's Short Practice of Surgery, 28th ed.
- Sabiston 22eSabiston Textbook of Surgery, 22nd ed.
- Maingot's 13eMaingot's Abdominal Operations, 13th ed.
- Browse's 6eBrowse's Introduction to the Symptoms and Signs of Surgical Disease, 6th ed.
- Oxford Handbook 5eOxford Handbook of Clinical Surgery, 5th ed.
- Schwartz's ABSITESchwartz's Principles of Surgery: ABSITE and Board Review
- Schwartz 11eSchwartz's Principles of Surgery, 11th ed.
- ABSITE Review 2022The ABSITE Review, 2022
- SESAP 17SESAP 17: Surgical Education and Self-Assessment Program, 17th ed. (American College of Surgeons)
- Mulholland & Greenfield's 7eMulholland & Greenfield's Surgery: Scientific Principles and Practice, 7th ed.
UK guidance
Some pages carry extra notes from NICE, the Royal College of Surgeons, specialty associations, national screening programmes and national audits. Those notes sit apart from the textbook material, and the UK guidelines switch beside the page title hides them. Turn it off and what is left is a textbook-only article. Every note links out to the document it came from.
What this site does not claim
- Not clinical advice. It is built for revision and reference. What you actually do belongs to you, your seniors and your local protocols.
- Not guaranteed current. Guidelines get revised. A page reflects its sources as they read when it was written, and the date in the footer says when the site was last rebuilt, not when each guideline was last checked. Confirm against the live guideline.
- Not peer reviewed. The text has been checked against the sources it cites. No specialist panel has read it.
- Not complete. Several general surgery topics are still missing, and the question bank draws on three of the books above.
Found a mistake?
Wrong matters more than missing. If something does not match the source it cites, or a figure or threshold looks off, open an issue and say which page and which sentence. Fixes get checked back against the source text.
Copyright
The books and guidelines cited throughout belong to their publishers and issuing bodies. Figures taken from those books are used here for non-commercial teaching and credited to their source in every caption. If you hold rights to anything used here and want it taken down, open an issue and it will go.