As aortic surgery enters its fourth decade, this book spares cardiovascular cognoscenti from another textbookish collection of stock images. It provides instead a trailblazing examination of important frontier areas such as noninvasive diagnosis, vasculogenic impotence, and thoracoabdominal aneurysms. Surgical peacocks might be taken aback by the timely chapters on renal percutaneous transluminal angioplasty. Nevertheless, they serve to instruct (or at least warn) those of us who still cling to surgery as the gold standard renal-revascularization technique.
The text also sharpens our focus on such rarities as subisthmic coarctations and postoperative spinal cord ischemia. Particularly deft essays cover the surgical management of acute visceral ischemia, as well as aortic trauma, dissections, and graft complications. The adjunctive role of intra-arterial papaverine (for mesenteric ischemia) and perioperative indications for a Swan-Ganz catheter are discussed in instructive detail.
Each expert-author refreshes what is known from the literature with his own data. We are never