Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Humanitarian Medicine is a practical guide covering all aspects of the provision of care in humanitarian situations and complex emergencies. It includes evidence-based clinical guidance, aimed specifically at resource limited situations, as well as essential non-clinical information relevant for people working in field operations and development. The handbook provides clear recommendations, from the experts, on the unique challenges faced by health providers in humanitarian settings including clinical presentations for which conventional medical training offers little preparation. It provides guidance for syndromic management approaches, and includes practical guidance on the integration of context specific mental health care. The handbook goes beyond the clinical domain, however, and also provides detailed information on the contextual issues involved in humanitarian operations, including health systems design, priorities in displacement, security and logistics. It outlines the underlying drivers at play in humanitarian settings, including economics, gender based inequities, and violence, guiding the reader through the epidemiological approaches in varied scenarios. It details the relevance of international law, and its practical application in complex emergencies, and covers the changing picture of humanitarian operations, with increasingly complicated and chaotic contexts and the escalation of violence against humanitarian providers and facility. The Oxford Handbook of Humanitarian Medicine draws on the accumulated experience of humanitarian practitioners from a variety of disciplines and contexts to provide an easily accessible source of information to guide the reader through the complicated scenarios found in humanitarian settings.