The art of pterygium surgery: mastering techniques and optimizing results. Editor Arun C. Gulani (2019) 191 pp, 173 illu
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BOOK REVIEW
The art of pterygium surgery: mastering techniques and optimizing results. Editor Arun C. Gulani (2019) 191 pp, 173 illustrations, Hardback ISBN: 9781626235113, Thieme Publishers New York/Stuttgart Liron Pe’er 1 & Oriel Spierer 1 Received: 29 June 2020 / Revised: 29 June 2020 / Accepted: 6 July 2020 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Pterygium excision surgery is one of the oldest types of surgery dating back 3000 years ago. During the years, the surgery has evolved and different techniques and adjunctive agents were introduced. From its title and preface, Arun C. Gulani’s book “The Art of Pterygium Surgery”, promises to cover the numerous pterygium surgical options a surgeon has in 2020. Visually, it is tempting to read, being very high quality printed and accompanied by over 150 colorful images. The online version of the book includes 21 videos which are a significant addition to the book. While reading the book, one cannot overlook the fact that some of the images appear more than once and some even three times (such as image 1.6 that is repeated as images 15.29 and 16.1). A more meticulous editing would prevent other errors regarding the images. For example, image 15.1 has captions “a,” “b,” “c,” “d,” while the image itself is only marked with “a” and “b.” The 163-page hardcover book includes 16 chapters that can each be read as a separate article, which is an advantage. Few of the chapters were written by Gulani himself, while most of the chapters were written by 31 contributing authors, some are wellknown eye surgeons. When there are many authors, an inherent weakness is the possibility of duplication of content throughout the book. It seems that in this case, this redundancy is a bit more than expected. For example, chapters 3, 4, and the first half of chapter 5, are all reviewing briefly the same different surgical techniques and adjunctive methods available for pterygium surgery. Chapter 9 again reviews the available adjunctive agents. Instead of repeating the same topics in short, as readers, we would prefer each topic to be more deeply discussed only once,
including more details of how to apply each technique in the operating room. A couple of good examples for this in the book are chapters 7 (conjunctival autografts) and 11 (stem cell application). In these chapters, the relevant topics are clearly introduced and discussed in-depth, accompanied by pictures from different stages of the surgery. Another topic that is presented in the book and could have been more deeply discussed is the complications of pterygium surgery. Chapter 13 discusses some of the complications but misses some important post-surgical complications such as corneal dellen and post-surgery infection. Although the online video 14 named “repairing surgical complications” presents an elegant option for treatment of scleral melting, treatments for other complications are missing. Towards the end of the book, several issues that every pterygium surgeon should keep in mind, such as the importance of
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