D.B. Longmore - Böcker

D. B. LONGMORE The concept ofthe meeting on which this book is based is unique. There has never be fore been a multi-disciplinary meeting based entirely on the concept of making a major branch of surgery safer. Hopefully, this meeting will be archetypal and will set a precedent for similar attempts in other disciplines as well as future efforts to make cardiac surgery safer. Cardiac surgery is still a rapidly growing discipline even after a quarter of a century of experience. Like any new area of science, or medicine, initially there is an exponential growth ofwork, publications, meetings, options of available equipment and all the ancillary and peripheral disciplines associated with it. The ideas of the handful of original surgical pioneers, some of whom have contributed to this book, formed the basis of a still rapidly growing young branch of surgery with a whole new medical discipline of total extracorporeal circulation involving biochemical and haemodynamic control of a patient.

Magnetic resonance is a safe, non-invasive technique which can be used to produce high resolution, thin tomographic slices in any chosen plane, or true three-dimensional blocks of information.

Modern Cardiac Surgery is based on, but does not consist completely of, papers submitted at the annual course of cardiac surgery run by the combined Institutes and Post-Graduate Hospitals involved in cardiac surgery in London (1977). The subjects which have been chosen and included fulfil one of two criteria; either they are subjects which were not included in the previous book, The Current Status of Cardiac Surgery, or they cover subjects which needed to be updated. Because this is a teaching course and not a symposium, the emphasis has been on being informative rather than on presenting masses of results. The book has been prepared partly from manuscripts submitted by the authors and partly from annotated tapes of the proceedings of the meeting. Through­ out the editing and production of this book careful consideration has been given to the requirements of the readership. The book is aimed at all students of cardiac surgery and cardiology at all levels, and as much information as possible has been packed into it. Neverthe­ less, the editor wishes to thank the authors for the efforts they have made to be concise and clear in their presentation and for their tremendous co-opera­ tion in alterations which have been incorporated to make it a more readable treatise. This means that this is a book which is of value to nurses interested in cardiology in intensive care, to physiotherapists and students wishing to look up particular topics before their final examinations.