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Today hundreds of thousands of Americans carry pacemakers and implantable cardioverter-defibrillators (ICDs) within their bodies. These battery-powered machines—small computers, in fact—deliver electricity to the heart to correct dangerous disorders of the heartbeat. But few doctors, patients, or scholars know the history of these devices or how "heart-rhythm management" evolved into a multi-billion-dollar manufacturing and service industry. Machines in Our Hearts tells the story of these two implantable medical devices. Kirk Jeffrey, a historian of science and technology, traces the development of knowledge about the human heartbeat and follows surgeons, cardiologists, and engineers as ...
The story told in this book begins in about 1700, when the first attempts were made to study the diseased heart in life (the subject matter of cardiology), as distinct from its appearance after death; it ends, rather arbitrarily, in 1970. The account of the development of knowledge of heart disease is mainly chronological with emphasis on the fruitful consequences of the cross-fertilization of clinical practice with pathological anatomy at the beginning of the nineteenth century and with physiology at the end. In addition, shorter chapters deals with such topics as specific disease entities, methods of investigation, cardiac surgery and the work of two individuals - Peter Latham, an example of a physician practising with today's clinical skills but a very imperfect knowledge of the pathogenesis of heart disease and Etienne Marey, an early exponent of the clinical physiology which would, in time, throw light on that pathogenesis.
More than 150 key social issues confronting the United States today are covered in this eight-volume set: from abortion and adoption to capital punishment and corporate crime; from obesity and organized crime to sweatshops and xenophobia.
Hypertension is a major health problem and contrary to ischemic heart disease, which occurs only in Western countries, its distribution is almost universal. It is this universality that has prompted us to gather, in this book, data on arterial blood pressure obtained in different parts of the world. Moreover, cerebrovascular mortality, which is the commonest cause of death from hypertension, is decreasing in most Western countries and in Japan, and the reasons for this are still far from clear. A major problem in comparing blood pressure values from different centers is the standardization of the measurement. Complete standardization will never be achieved if one takes into account the numer...
This book comprises the essential records from a Boerhaave course given in June 1971 for specialists in cardiology and other fields of internal medicine interested in the subject of quantitation in cardiology. It is evident that in the wide field of medicine, and particularly in cardiology, there is a growing need for exact and detailed information in conjunction with existing diag nostic methods. This is apparent in the greater precision in anatomical and haemodynamic details required by the thoracic surgeon as the number of available heart operations gradually increases. In retrospect it is hardly surprising that the high initial mortality after the introduction of each operation depended ...
Since the first pacemaker implantation in October 1958 by Senning and Elmqvist in Sweden, cardiac pacing for bradycardia has become a well-established therapy. The impressive growth of clinical experience and the rapid development of pacemaker devices have greatly contributed to this situation. The electrical therapy appears to be so easy that insertion of the lead and its connection to the pacemaker generator requires little effort, skill or insight. However, after implantation a patient's condition seldom remains stable, which requires a flexible pacing program to cover all new cardiac events, and broad insight from clinician and technical colleagues. The Pacemaker Clinic of the 90's teaches anatomical and electrophysiological aspects of pacing, supports the prevention of complications, and points to new developments in the field. Apart from classical indications for cardiac pacing, the book discusses the validity of the latest indications, supporting the cardiologist and the associated professional in selecting the appropriate pacing mode and pacemaker follow-up in individual patients. The Pacemaker Clinic of the 90's will be a helpful companion for years to come.
To our knowledge, this is the first book dealing exclusively with myocardial contrast two-dimensional echocardiography (MC-2DE), a new and exciting diagnostic methodology for assessment of myocardial perfusion, which has seen rapid development and has now entered the clinical stage. The experi mental research and human applications have been described in technical papers published in a variety of journals, but our objective is to provide the reader with a comprehensive and concentrated overview of the field and of the current state of the art. To facilitate appreciation of the significant ad vances made and issues yet to be resolved, we are pleased to have several well known specialists cont...
We all know how much time, effort and money it takes to develop a new drug. Hundreds of chemical compounds have to be synthesized and thousands of different activities in biology, physiology, pharmacology, clinical investigation, management and marketing have to be initiated and coordinated. Each new drug starts a voyage of discovery through an unmapped terrain which is shrouded in mist and beset by pitfalls, as Dr. Rein Vos puts it in his absorbing inside story of the development of the beta-adrenoceptor blocking agents and the calcium antagonists. Indeed we know, for example, how long it took before the theory of Ahlquist of the alpha and beta adrenergic receptors was widely accepted. Similarly, it suffices to memorize shortly the difficulty of expanding the new concept of calcium antagonism through the national German boundaries into the world. This shows how laborious and complex pharmaceutical progress is, and we all will benefit from a deeper understanding of the process of innovative drug research.