Surgical Intensive Care Medicine has been specifically designed to be a practical reference for medical students and house officers to help manage the critically ill surgical patient. The first section is titled “Resuscitation” and exposes the reader to a condensed version of generic topics in primary intensive care medicine. The sections that follow have been categorized according to medical and surgical subspecialties and cover the most germane of problems encountered in a tertiary surgical intensive care unit.

Sections of certain chapters, while repetitive, have been left intact in an attempt to maintain the authors' messages and provide the reader with some contradictory but referenced views. The technical chapters describe a very introductory approach to various exercises such as airway management and vascular cannulation.