Hand and Wrist Anatomy and Biomechanics: A Comprehensive Guide

As a service to our readers, Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery® reviews books, DVDs, practice management software, and electronic media items of educational interest to reconstructive and aesthetic surgeons. All items are copyrighted and available commercially. The Journal actively solicits information in digital format for review. Reviewers are selected on the basis of relevant interest. Reviews are solely the opinion of the reviewer; they are usually published as submitted, with only copy editing. Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery® does not endorse or recommend any review so published. Send books, DVDs, and any other material for consideration to: Arun K. Gosain, M.D., Review Editor, Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, Brookriver Executive Center, 8150 Brookriver Drive, Suite S-415, Dallas, Texas 75247. Arun K. Gosain, M.D. Review EditorFor hand surgeons, an intimate knowledge of anatomy and biomechanics of the hand and wrist is essential. This allows accurate diagnosis and treatment of the many problems afflicting this area of the body. In most textbooks focusing on the hand and wrist, the first chapter is focused on anatomy and biomechanics. This is true for specialized texts such as Cooney’s text The Wrist and also more generalized texts such as Grabb and Smith’s Plastic Surgery. The purpose of this slim volume by Hirt and colleagues as stated by the authors is to gather the disciplines of anatomy, surface anatomy, and kinematics of the hand into a single volume, so that practitioners who work with patients can have this information readily available. The authors have succeeded with respect to this aim, as this volume contains enough information to be informative without going into excessive detail. The first section of the book focuses on anatomy and function, and the second section focuses on surface anatomy of the forearm, wrist, and hand. The first section proceeds in a logical fashion from anatomy of the proximal and distal radioulnar joints to the wrist to the hand. The second section is organized in a similar fashion. As a practicing hand surgeon, I find it more useful to review a specific area of anatomy relevant to the surgical abnormality of interest, rather than have all information on hand and wrist anatomy gathered into one volume. Green’s Operative Hand Surgery, a standard text of hand surgery, takes this same approach where, in each chapter, the relevant anatomy is presented before discussion of diagnosis and treatment. However, other surgeons and therapists dealing with patients with abnormality in the hand may have a different preference. Much of the information presented in this book has been published in a different form, either collated into a single chapter or disseminated among different chapters in a hand surgery text. As such, this book is probably most useful for those who are looking specifically for a specialized anatomy text relating to the hand and wrist. For most plastic and hand surgeons, this volume may have limited utility.