Problems in Anesthesia for Operations on the Heart

IMPROVEMENTS in anesthetic technics have contributed in large part to the advance of cardiac surgery. On the other hand cardiac surgery has progressed so rapidly in the last decade that anesthesia has been hard pressed to keep abreast of the problems presented. Perhaps because of increased knowledge of the physiology of heart disease and the pharmacology of anesthetic agents, the reported results of anesthesia for cardiac surgery have been relatively good.1 2 3 In this clinic a great deal of surgery is accomplished in poor-risk patients, with excellent results. It is the purpose of this report, however, to review some of the . . .