Fundamentals of Electrocardiography

Judging from the rate at which new entries invade the medical book market, the subject of electrocardiography appears to have an unusually strong appeal to textbook writers. The greatest concentration of books about electrocardiography resides within the category of primers and introductory texts for beginners. At the more advanced level, the choices become scantier, while a search for a truly comprehensive single-author textbook, if one excludes books on arrhythmias, takes us some 30 years back to Lepeschkin in the United States and Holzmann in Europe. The Fundamentals by E. M. McLachlan (who, we learn in the preface, has spent most of his professional life in a small town in New Zealand) is intended for use by medical students, house staff, nurses, and technicians. From the large pack of similarly targeted volumes arriving from English-speaking countries or in translation, this particular textbook has a good chance of moving into a winning