Advances in Cardiovascular Surgery [antikvár]

Foreword This monograph on Advances in Cardiovascular Surgery (1973) is the result of my being invited by Drs. Willis Hurst and Dean Mason to produce such a work. Being generally unenthusiastic about books with multiple authors, I considered writing this myself. Quickly it became apparent that much of the potential excitement and authority of the monograph would be lost by doing this. So I invited some of the people who have made these advances to join in producing the monograph, and in each instance they have submitted superb analyses and presentations. Some editorial liberties have been taken with these to provide co-hesiveness and minimize duplication. The reader will realize that many who have made significant contributions could not be included as authors, and that some recent advances have been omitted. Clearly cardiac surgery remains as dynamic as it was in the early years after the late John Gibbon first successfully used a pump-oxy-genator when he closed an atrial septal defect in an 18 year old girl in 1953. Although numerically not the commonest group of cardiac lesions submitted to operation, congenital heart disease continues to be an interesting and important area for surgical effort. As indicated in the first thirteen chapters, advances are still being made even though the earliest efforts in open intracardiac surgery were made in congenital heart disease. Advances in the surgical treatment of valvular heart disease center on improvements in the prosthetic devices used for valvar replacement and on cardiac performance late postoperatively and its determinants.