E. William Hancock

The Pericardium in Health and Disease

Dr Noble Fowler, of the University of Cincinnati, has produced an excellent book on pericardial disease. Although a few chapters on specialty topics are contributed by Spodick (history and electrocardiography), Nasser (congenital defects), Shabetai (physiology), and Engel (echocardiography), the main body of the volume consists of discussions by Fowler of the principal clinical types of pericardial disease and of cardiac tamponade and paradoxical pulse, and is essentially a clinical monograph. The writing style is clear, and the presentation is straightforward and factual. The clinical opinions expressed are heavily based on the authors own experience, which is extensive and well reviewed. The central clinical descriptive portion of the book consists of chapters on acute pericarditis, infectious pericarditis, and chronic pericarditis; these chapters include a review of the literature that is detailed and well balanced. Specific etiologic types of pericardial disease, eg, neoplastic, uremic, and rheumatic, are covered under one or another

Two-Dimensional Echocardiography: Clinical-Pathological Correlations in Adult and Congenital Heart Disease

This is a large and handsome book that combines the features of an atlas and a textbook of echocardiography. The authors are from four different institutions and represent the fields of adult and pediatric cardiology and cardiovascular pathology. The books main strength is the large number and high quality of the illustrations, which includes nearly 500 two-dimensional echocardiographic frames as well as some M-mode illustrations. There are also more than 100 gross anatomic illustrations, mostly cross sections of the whole heart that are made to simulate the various anatomic planes that are visualized by two-dimensional echocardiography. While not usually taken from the same patients whose echocardiograms are illustrated, the anatomic illustrations presented in the context of a textbook and atlas of echocardiography make the volume uniquely useful for echocardiographic-anatomic correlation. The discussions of etiology, clinical features, and additional diagnostic studies are necessarily limited in scope and do not carry the