This interdisciplinary account provides an integrated and practical guide to the management and treatment of burns. Experts from all the major disciplines involved in critical care have focused their attention on specific problems and areas of treatment involved in the care of burned patients. Although it is essentially a practical guide to the management of thermal injury, with explicit recommendations for courses of treatment, it also provides explanatory background information on the manifestations and clinical consequences of this common source of injury. Between them, the contributors encompass all the major facets of critical care of the burned patient: from initial assessment and monitoring, resuscitation, nutritional aspects, infection, anaesthesia and surgical management, right through to postoperative care and prognosis. The volume will be useful to specialists in critical care, intensive and emergency medicine, surgery and anaesthesia, and to all staff associated with intensive care and burns units.