This book, "The Auricular Arrhythmias," is not a textbook, but is the result of five years of team-work of five authors and eight associate authors on the mechanism, clinical manifestation, and treatment of the following auricular arrhythmias: premature systole, tachycardia, flutter, and fibrillation. During the past 30 years, most of the work on the mechanism of these arrhythmias has been dominated by the brilliant experiments of Sir Thomas Lewis, whose circus-movement theory appeared very convincing to most investigators.
Dr. Prinzmetal and his co-workers made use of a high speed cinematograph that could take motion pictures of the auricles at rates varying between 500 and 3,000 frames per second; thus they were the first ones to record the exact mechanical events of the wave of contractions of the auricles. The use of the dual-beam cathode-ray oscillograph, which records the electrical activity of the auricles over 1,000 times that provided by the