“The ‘Holy Plane’ of Rectal Surgery,” R.J. Heald, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, vol. 81, September 1988, pp. 503–8. The author, at Basingstoke District Hospital, Basingstoke, U.K., explains [AIR 16:1]:
this is the story of a simple artisan’s pleasure in the actual style of performing an operation—in essence the way to use a pair of scissors to define and develop a plane in a precise manner…. A surgical plane is a potential space between contiguous organs which can be reproducibly created by dissection…. It has long been a strong personal preference to find these planes around the gut and its derivatives with exasperating slowness