Search

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. It has become the method of choice for studying the central nervous system, the vertebral column and many joints, but has not yet gained general acceptance in researching the cardiovascular system, although there are techniques for overcoming the problems of cardiac movement to produce excellent cardiovascular images. The purpose of this book is to provide the student and radiologist with a reference which can be used to identify the major structures in the body, bearing in mind that in each region a more detailed high-resolution study can usually be obtained by specialised units. The illustrations, each of which is accompanied by an explanatory line drawing, are soft tissue images based on the water content rather than the familiar X-ray shadowgram of mainly hard tissues.

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.

This book consists of an edited report of the proceedings of the Fifth Cardiac Surgical Course run by the Royal Post-Graduate Medical School, The Institute of Cardiology, The Institute of Diseases of the Chest, The Institute of Child Health, The National Heart Hospital, The Brompton Hospital, The Hammersmith Hospital and Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital. These organisations encompass most of the major London hospitals associated with cardiac surgery. The course has been run annually, its aim being to help young men and women who are training in the specialised field of cardiac surgery. Thus this book consists of the proceedings of a teaching course rather than of a symposium, the 60 authors having been charged with the task of teaching rather than displaying their results or discussing their latest ideas and the proceedings reflect an interesting appraisal of the current status of cardiac surgery. The speakers were chosen from all over the world, because they were leaders in their field or because they have access to up to date and reliable information, and I am grateful to all the lecturers for their cooperation in the production of this volume. Ten thousand surgical cases are reported. These figures are drawn from experience in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Switzerland, the United States of America, Australia and New Zealand. The reader may be surprised to find that only a handful of experiments are described.