[Inguinal hernia repair: bringing order to variety]

- With around 30,000 interventions a year, correction of an inguinal hernia is one of the most commonly performed surgeries in the Netherlands. One would therefore expect the same technique to be used all over the world by now. There are nevertheless different procedures, depending on a patient's age and history, the type of inguinal hernia and the expertise of the surgeon.- When the pathophysiology of an inguinal hernia became clear at the end of the 19th century, Bassini laid the foundation of modern inguinal hernia surgery: reinforcing the posterior wall of the inguinal canal after repositioning the hernial sac with its contents.- Although current surgical treatment still follows this principle, there are now many different techniques for this. Some are named after the 'inventor' of such an operation (Shouldice, Lichtenstein and Stoppa) while others are indicated with an abbreviation (TEP, TAPP, TIPP and TREPP).- In this review article, we describe the surgical techniques currently most common in the Netherlands and bring order to the chaos of proper names and abbreviations.