Books

It comes as a surprise to realize how litte effort has been made to translate the extensive data obtained by the techniques of cardiac catheterization into the important approaches to bedside medicine which they can illuminate so helpfully. In this book Wild has made the effort to simplify bedside teaching in a way that seems at first paradoxical, by adding complexities to a different subject. This always happens when we depart from the cookbook approach, where signs and symptoms have been learned as mere symbols rather than in terms of the dynamic mechanisms responsible. Wild achieves his goal of clarity and actual simplification by the employment of a series of charts beginning with the simplest concepts and adding additional features one at a time. Originally his method employed transparent and superimposable sheets so that the combinations could be studied in any sequence or combination. Though this is not an easy