Professor Negovskii, as head of the Laboratory of Experimental Physiology of Resuscitation, Academy of Medicine, USSR, has compiled this rather lengthy work on his own researches as well as the researches of other scientists into terminal states. His main efforts have been toward documenting the morphological, biochemical, and physiological changes that occur as death approaches (agony), after cardiac and respiratory arrest (clinical death), and resuscitation. He differentiates clinical death from biological death as reversible versus irreversible. For the most part the experimental animal is the dog, and death is invoked by an exsanguination technique which is very repeatable. Resuscitation is nearly always based on intra-arterial transfusion accompanied by artificial respiration, both internal and external massage, and various other supportive techniques.
The discussion of the physiology underlying death as well as the biochemical and morphological explanations are extremely interesting and are brought together and correlated probably for the first time. The