Clinical Aids in Cardiac Diagnosis.

William Dressler has written a book which reflects his excellence as a clinical cardiologist. He is appropriately concerned over an apparent increasing tendency of physicians to forsake bedside observations for laboratory studies which are expensive, occasionally traumatic, and sometimes misleading. To demonstrate the validity of the conclusions reached at the bedside, hemodynamic correlations are used which are mostly sound and well based. However, there is inconsistency in the depth of these hemodynamic explanations without apparent pattern or specific design. A few of these explanations might even be challenged, for example, a rather detailed examination of the nature of the venous pulse "C" wave is largely based on a very unusual curve obtained transthoracically under very unusual circumstances. One would seriously suspect that the wave in question was an artifact and not a true "C" wave since this reviewer has never seen anything like it in scores of normal venous