What is a surgical complication

In preparing for a lecture on the ethics of surgical com-plications, it became apparent that confusion exists about the definition of a ‘‘surgical complication.’ ’ Is it, as one medical website states, ‘‘any undesirable result of sur-gery?’ ’ [1]. In the European Journal of Surgery, Veen et al. [2] provide a more elaborate definition: ‘‘every unwanted development in the illness of the patient or in the treatment of the patient’s illness that occurs in the clinic’ ’ [2]. An esteemed historian of science suggests yet another defini-tion in a recent volume on surgical complications: ‘‘a complication, in any sphere of endeavour, is something out of the norm, and the product of extraneous and unexpected factors’ ’ [3]. Such is the discrepancy in definitions that Rampersaud et al. [4] declared in 2006 that ‘‘presently, there is no clear or consistent definition of a complicatio