The field of surgical education is emerging with its own identity. As healthcare training changes it is becoming increasingly important to map the potential of this new educational domain and establish its epistemological foundations. Clinical teams and patients can benefit from the evolving boundaries between surgery and the interventional specialties.

An excellent textbook called "Surgical Education: Theorising an Emerging Domain" discusses the emergence of surgical education as a distinct field of academic study within the context of current and historical environments of surgical training and learning.

Edited by Heather Fry of Bristol and Roger Kneebone from Imperial College London, the volume includes essays from a variety of surgical experts. Heather Fry provides an excellent introduction into the foundation theories of surgical education, while Roger Kneebone includes a chapter on the current state of simulation in surgical education and perspectives for the future.

The text is rounded out by a number of other surgeons and academics from around the world:

• Nick Sevdalis discusses the frontiers of research in surgical education from familiar quantitative research, while also introducing the qualitative and mixed methods research methodologies less familiar to surgeons

• Lambert Schuwith and Cees van der Vleuten introduce the expanding topic of assessment in surgical education

• Ray Land and Jan Meyer provide a lens into the emerging field of threshold concepts in the learning process of surgical education and their understanding of ontological transformations, in the chapter titled “The Scalpel and the ‘Mask’”

• Anders Ericcson discusses the acquisition of surgical expertise and reproducible performance

• Fernando Bello and Harry Brenton introduce future technologies in surgical education including e-learning

• Debra Nestel and Lesley Bentley review the role of the patient in surgical education

• Carol-Anne Moulton and Ronald Epstein discuss the concept of slowing down as an approach to self-monitoring and becoming a mindful surgeon

• Alan Bleakey explores the role of communities of practice and other organizational issues within the surgical community and their role in surgical education

• Lorelei Lingard focuses her chapter on the teaching of communication skills and the development of teamwork training and other non-operative surgical skills

• Gunther Kress closes with some perspectives on the learning, teaching and researching exploring frames of reference that will improve surgical education into the future.

I highly recommend this insightful text to AO educators as it underscores the potential to further improve our current education programs and challenges us to evaluate our current practices with research and innovation to avoid stagnation and mediocrity.