Resuscitation and Cardiac Pacing.

The past several years have witnessed the development of an aggressive new attitude in therapeutic attacks on severe heart disease and particularly on some of the acute lifethreatening events which may appear in the course of such conditions as acute myocardial infarction and complete heart block. As recently as ten years ago, the acute cessation of effective activity was almost always an irrevocable event, and blows on the chest and intracardiac injections of epinephrine, while often resorted to, were virtually never successful in restoring an effective circulation. Such acute catastrophes are now referred to collectively as instances of cardiac and, as Smith1 has pointed out, the term is apt, implying as it does that the state of cessation of an effective heart beat is transient or remediable and promoting the thought of prompt counteraction. Experience with modern techniques indicates that, depending on the circumstances of the arrest, survival