This volume presents the proceedings of the First International Symposium on Pulsatile Blood Flow, held at the Presbyterian Hospital, Philadelphia, in April, 1963. It reports a multidisciplinary approach to arterial hemodynamics and includes as participants not only physicians, but biophysicists, mathematicians, physiologists and engineers.
The first half of the book consists of detailed considerations of theoretical hydrodynamics with meticulous presentation of the mathematical derivations involved. These mathematical manipulations are sophisticated, and their comprehension requires some considerable familiarity with differential and integral calculus as well as with other tools and techniques peculiar not only to the mathematician but also to the hydrodynamicist. Such are the complexities of the problems under consideration in this volume that Fry and Greenfield, two contributors to it, indicate that the role of the physiologist in this area may consist in some measure simply of the identification of the ultimate objectives of studies in circulatory hydrodynamics and