In the cemetery of forgotten books.

The magic world of the sensational Spanish novel The Shadow of the Wind serves as an excellent background to indicate the importance of forgotten surgical books by surgeons-in-the making or surgeons-in-practice. Why would this book be helpful to surgeons, when it mainly refers to a 10-year-old Daniel, who had been taken by his father to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books? In this cemetery, this unique place, certain books are subjected to oblivion and condemned to be forgotten. We have transported these particular fictional circumstances to the life and practice of the contemporary surgeon. We have imagined the forgotten books as the surgical books disregarded or lost by a great number of surgical specialists, the forgotten books of surgical history that we do not emphasize in our surgical residency programs. These volumes comprise our own Cemetery of Forgotten Surgical Books.