Principles of Facial Reconstruction is an excellent book for any trainee in plastic surgery, ENT or maxillofacial surgery. It is a well written book, that subdivides facial reconstruction into each subunit, with different chapters for each area. There are 10 chapters with seven dedicated to separate areas for reconstruction (scalp, forehead, eyes, nose, etc).
The first two chapters are dedicated to physiology and fundamental techniques. They cover the basic principles of wound healing, scar placement (relaxed skin tension lines) and basic geometric design of workhorse flaps that all facial surgeons should have a solid understanding of. Each subsequent chapter addresses separate subunits within the face, covering basic relevant anatomy and guides the reader through reconstruction of different defects within these subunits. The defects encountered are reconstructed using the authors’ preferred choice of local flap where relevant. Each flap is well described and accompanied with helpful descriptions, diagrams and pictures illustrating the described techniques, as well as showing the postoperative results.
The final chapter even offers helpful descriptions of how to harvest different grafts to aid and augment these reconstructions. They describe raising bone and cartilage grafts from different donor sites, including costal cartilage grafts and also describe how to deal with some complications including a pleural tear.
I really enjoyed reading this book and although it does not include all flaps that you may come across in the head and neck area or is as extensive as some other textbooks, it does offer reliable reconstructive options for most defects you could encounter in skin cancer surgery in the head and neck area. It was a pleasant read, easy to follow and easy to understand the techniques the authors are describing. The coloured photographs and illustrated texts really complement the descriptions.
I would definitely recommend this book to any trainee involved in facial reconstruction to give them a good grounding and a good algorithm on how to approach different aspects of facial reconstruction.
