Applied Respiratory Physiology [antikvár]

Foreword to the First Edition A Flame for Hypnos The lighted candle respires and we call it flame. The body respires and we call it life. Neither flame nor life is substance, but process. The flame is as different from the wiclc and wax as life from the body, as gravitation from the falling apple, or love from a hormone. Newton taught science to have faith in processes as well as substances—to compute, predict and depend upon an irrational attraction. Caught up in enlightenment, man began to regard himself as a part of nature, a subject for investigation. The web of self-knowledge, woven so slowly between process and substance, still weaves physiology, the process, and anatomy, the substance, into the whole cloth of clinical medicine. Within this multihued fabric, the warp fibres of process shine most clearly in the newest patterns, among which must be numbered anaesthesiology. The tailors who wove the sciences into the clinical practice of anaesthetics are men of our time such as Ralph Waters and Chauncey Leake who knit together respiratory physiology and pharmacology to cloak the first medical school Department of Anesthesiology, at Wisconsin, scarcely 45 years ago. Both of them still delight in watching the fashion parade they set in motion. Their partnership lasted only five years, but anaesthesiology and respiratory physiology remain as intimately interwoven as any pair of clinical and basic sciences. In this volume stands the evidence: references to more than 100 anaesthetists who have substantially contributed to respiratory physiology and John Francis Nunn's superb text which, for the first time, comprehensively binds the two together. Man's interest in his own reaction to his environment constituted a further leap of the intellect. From substance to process to self-examination, and then full circle to the processes of interaction. 1969 may be considered the centenary of environmental or applied physiology. One hundred years ago Paul Bert, in a series of lectures to the Academic de Science in Paris, proposed to investigate the role of the low partial pressure of oxygen upon the distress experienced at high altitudes. Applying Dalton's law of partial pressures to physiology for the first time, he thus launched his monumental research of the barometric pressure, surely the cornerstone of applied physiology. The demands of military aviation during World War II generated a quantum jump of interest in applied physiology, exemplified by the founding 21 years ago of the Journal of Applied Physiology. This youngster, having just come of age, provides well over 100 references in Nunn's text, many of them written by anaesthetists. Anaesthesia may justly claim its birthright share of Applied Respiratory Physiology. Three years hence will be celebrated the