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This issue of the Medical Clinics of North America provides an up-to-date, authoritative, and concise, but thorough, clinical review of what the busy practitioner needs to know about handling gastrointestinal emergencies. These emergencies are important to clinicians and their patients and are relatively common. Mechanical gastrointestinal obstruction and acute upper gastrointestinal bleeding, for example, are each individually responsible for more than 300,000 hospitalizations per annum in the United States. These emergencies require urgent, correct, life-or-death decisions for a successful outcome. The clinician has to recognize a true gastrointestinal emergency among the vast number of patients presenting with mostly mundane abdominal complaints. If therapy is delayed because the emergency goes unrecognized, the mortality increases dramatically. New clinical data based on clinical trials, novel diagnostic tests, and high technology therapies are increasing exponentially. This monograph assists the entire medical team involved in gastrointestinal emergencies.