ABSTRACT The messages of Ira Rutkow's Socioeconomics of Surgery are these: (1) that surgical care is the easiest specialty to regulate because operations are well-defined events and costs with fairly obvious consequences; (2) that data for regulation of surgical care are being gathered by a host of nonsurgical scientists, some of whom are not physicians; (3) that it is unfortunate that more surgeons are not involved in or even conversant with studies designed to gather such data; and (4) that they had better get involved in order to prevent unreasonable regulation of surgeons and unfair consequences for patients. He's right!The book, which is intended to be a compendium of information relative to surgical socioeconomic matters, has five sections: (1) surgical demographics, (2) delivery and financing of surgical services, (3) quality of surgical care, (4) legal and ethical issues in surgery, and (5) a summary, which gives Dr Rutkow's personal perspective