Assisting at a surgical operation is an important task, and one that in my opinion, is sometimes under–appreciated. Without a skilful surgical assistant, all operations become more difficult. This added difficulty may not matter much in simple operations, but in complex ones, it matters a great deal. It may make the difference between a complex operation being merely challenging for the surgeon, and it being unsafe or almost impossible. Most surgeons would be reluctant to perform a complex operation without skilful assistance.

Surgery, and assisting at surgery, is a manual craft. In any manual craft, no expert can be created by simply reading textbooks on the subject. However, it is my hope that this book will hasten the process. I hope that it will help the reader to acquire more rapidly, information that previously has largely been obtainable only in a haphazard manner by spending years in the operating theatre.

The purpose of this book is to describe the general principles and techniques, which help to make a skilful surgical assistant in any specialty of surgery. However, some surgical subspecialties do require of the assistant, certain additional skills, which are described in the relevant chapters by my subspecialist colleagues.

It is not the book's intention to describe particular operations in detail. Indeed, specific operations are only mentioned where they are useful as examples, or where the assistant has a specific important role. To include here, a comprehensive description of all the various surgical operations in all the surgical specialties would obviously require a very large (and therefore very expensive) set of texts.