Physiologic Principles of Heart Sounds and Murmurs

As the editors state at the beginning of this book, "this symposium has been developed with the express purpose of providing medical educators and students with a detailed physiologic understanding of the principles underlying the major cardiac acoustic events, whether normal or pathologic. The valid application of these principles will result in improved clinical recognition of abnormal function in the cardiovascular system." To this extent, the book succeeds admirably. The first 11 papers in this symposium deal with the origin of the various heart sounds, excluding murmurs, in normal and pathologic states. The data in these papers and in the other papers of this symposium were obtained by both noninvasive and invasive techniques. These first papers suggested that vibrations of the whole cardiohemic mass are caused by the sudden deceleration of moving columns of blood; these vibrations are perceived as sound. The next 14 papers deal with murmurs; innocent and