Ballistocardiography in Cardiovascular Research: Physical Aspects of the Circulation in Health and Disease

Ballistocardiography stands now where electrocardiography stood in the first quarter of this century. Sooner or later we shall be using it and we may as well get used to the idea. It affords a means of measuring, from outside the patient, the force-producing capability of the heart within. For every action there is an equal but opposite action. When blood is thrown around the vascular circuit, both the pump which is doing the throwing and the conduits into which it is flung, react. As technology provided increasingly elegant instruments for graphing this movement, interest widened. The intimate details of the genesis of this movement constitute the basis for the authors' work. Happily, Starr and Noordergraaf have presented a well-documented analysis of their own and other worthwhile explorations in this field. When the problem yields, as it ultimately will, to such persistent probers, we shall have a means of analyzing the