154 BOOK REVIEWS

CLASSICS IN ARTERIAL HYPERTENSION. By Arthur Ruskin, M.D., Springfield, Ill., 1956, Charles C Thomas, 3.58 pages. Price $9.50.

This book is composed of selected publications (translated into English where necessary) of investigators whose contributions are milestones in the history of arterial blood pressure.

A brief and amusing introductory chapter deals with pulse-lore, and this is followed by a history of the methods of measuring blood pressure. This begins with the work of Stephen Hales (1733), who measured intravascular pressures in animals much as one measures the cerebrospinal fluid pressure of patients today. There follows the investigations of Poiseuille, who adapted the mercury manometer to the measurement of intravascular pressures; the project was carried out and published while Poiseuille was still a senior medical student in Paris. After dealing with other significant contributions, this section culminates in the 1905 pdblication of Korotkov on the auscultatory method of measuring systolic and diastolic blood pressures as currently employed.

In the chapters entitled “Significance” one encounters the paper of Richard Bright, corre- lating sclerosis of the kidneys with hardness and fullness of the pulse. This paper was published in 1827, one year before that of Poiseuille which dealt with the manometric measurement of in- travascular pressure. On the basis of Bright’s work, hypertension was regarded as being entirely of renal origin, and it was not until the turn of the century that the present concept of primary and secondary hypertension evolved. When one realizes that some seven decades elapsed be- tween the publications of Bright and Poiseuille and the development of the first clinically accep- table sphygmomanometer by Riva-Rocci (1896), one can appreciate the difficulties that faced the mid-nineteenth century clinicians and pathologists in their efforts to unravel the interrela- tionships of hypertension, renal disease, and arteriosclerosis.

The closing chapters are comprised of papers dealing with the etiology of hypertension. The first one is by Tigerstedt and Bergman (1897), and describes their discovery of the pressor activity of renal extracts; the final one, appropriately enough, is Goldblatt’s (1934) treatise on the pro- duction of experimental renal hypertension.

This book will intrigue those whose main concern is the field of hypertension, and will be equally appealing to those interested in the experimental method and clinical observation.

B. A. L.

THE CLINICAL ASPECTS OF ARTERIOSCLEROSIS. By Seymour H. Rinzler, M.D., Springfield, Ill., 1957, Charles C Thomas, 339 pages. Price $8.75.

The author’s principal objective in writing this monograph is to summarize the extensive and widely scattered literature on the clinical aspects of arteriosclerosis for the guidance of the general practitioner who is frequently confronted with such problems.

The term arteriosclerosis is defined in a generic sense to include atheromatosis, atherosclerosis, Monckeberg’s sclerosis, and hyperplastic (involutionary) arteriosclerosis, but almost all the

detailed discussion in the book concerns atherosclerosis, and the terms arteriosclerosis and athero- sclerosis are often used more or less interchangeably throughout the text.

The first chapter, which lists nearly 300 references to the literature, deals with the incidence of arteriosclerosis and summarizes current ideas on the role of various factors in the etiology and

pathogenesis of the condition. This chapter is somewhat disappointing because it is neither long enough to supply the sophisticated reader with a comprehensive summary of all the conflicting points of view, nor short and critical enough to provide authoritative guidance for the reader who is merely searching for a reasonable, provisional attitude which he may use as a guide in clinical

practice, pending clarification of the disputed issues by future research. The next seven chapters are devoted to a discussion of the clinical manifestations, diagnosis,

and treatment of coronary heart disease. Apart from the more liberal use of references to the

literature, this section of the monograph follows the conventional pattern of a chapter on coronary heart disease in a tmtbook of cardiology. Chapters on the treatment of congestive heart failure and on drug therapy of disorders of the heart beat are also included in this section, but, as might have been expected, it was not possible in a monograph on arteriosclerosis to allocate sufficient