The Conduction of the Cardiac Impulse: The Slow Response and Cardiac Arrhythmias

Electrophysiology of the Heart by B. Hoffman and P. Cranefield is already 15 years old but as yet no successors or competitors have challenged the dominant role of this basic textbook. The new Cranefield makes no pretense to alter this status by serving as an updated comprehensive textbook of cardiac electrophysiology à la Hoffman and Cranefield. The new text is more limited in scope, more probing, and much more similar to a monograph. Hoffman's absence does not mean the dissolution of the productive partnership because Hoffman did play an active role in the initial phase of experiments that form the background of this book. Wit and others also collaborated in these studies, which were begun in the late sixties, with an aim to create new models of experimental arrhythmias. These experiments revealed many previously unobserved phenomena and brought to light some puzzling meanderings of cardiac impulse through fragments of depressed