This book demonstrates clearly how to perform a clinical examination in the infant or child with a surgical condition. While most textbooks of pediatric surgery focus on the pathological classification and overall management of disease, in clinical practice physicians and surgeons usually use a problem-oriented approach to clinical diagnosis. Surprisingly, this is rarely taught to students. The authors attempt to redress this imbalance by providing a clinical approach to the patient which can be learned with a minimum of factual information. The book should therefore remain useful to the practitioner throughout his or her medical career. It includes detailed coverage of the usual presentations of common diseases, but does not attempt to cover all aspects of the presentations of uncommon diseases unless their recognition is important for the well-being or survival of the child. Generously illustrated, this is a book for all who are learning the art of pediatric surgical diagnosis.

Cryptorchidism remains a common but poorly understood anomaly affecting 2%-5% of children. Major controversies exist over the timing and type of treat ment (i. e. surgical vs hormonal therapy) and whether intervention prevents sub sequent infertility and testicular cancer. Part of the dilemma is caused by lack of understanding of the normal process of descent, despite intensive research and study since the eighteenth century, when Hunter and von Haller first described the gubernaculum (caudal genito-inguinal ligament) and processus vaginalis (Williams and Hutson 1991a). More needs to be known, not only of the normal mechanism, but also of the ways that it can be deranged to produce undescended testes. This review describes the recent results of studies on normal descent, with emphasis on our studies of the different stages of descent. As the reader will appreciate, the ever-more complex models proposed to account for normal tes ticular descent predict that undescended testes will be caused by a multitude of anomalies affecting different stages of the process. A description is given of current hypotheses of the aetiology of cryptorchidism, correlating these with studies of cryptorchid animal models. For a more detailed description of the numerous ideas about the mechanism, the reader is referred to Heyns and Hutson (1995) and other monographs (Fonkalsrud and Mengel 1981; Abney and Keel 1989)."

This book provides a detailed guide to neonatal surgery and its related disciplines including: fetal medicine, fetal surgery, radiology, newborn anaesthesia, intensive care, neonatal medicine, medical genetics, pathology, cardiac surgery, and urology. The book aims to cover all the latest advances in newborn surgery, with contributions from the basic sciences and laboratory research to reflect the steady progress in our current working knowledge and understanding of many neonatal surgical disorders. As huge advances have been made in neonatal surgery in the past decades, ethical issues, long term outcomes, and quality of life are also emphasised. This book is an authoritative reference for surgical residents in training, consultant surgeons, general surgeons with an interest in paediatric surgery, neonatologists, paediatricians, intensive care specialists, and nursing staff.