Jean Natali The pathophysiology and management of chronic critical limb -ischaemia (CLI) has always been a problematic area, at least partly because it involves doc tors from a wide range of the traditional medical specialities including vascular surgery, angiology, diabetology, haematology and radiology. The treatment of these patients also varies largely with local circumstances and national traditions. CLI therefore seemed a particularly appropriate subject for a new type of European consensus approach. In 1988 a series of small workshops were held by the European Working Group on Critical...

This book is an edited verbatim account of the proceedings of the Second London Workshop on Red Cell Filtration and Deformability, organised jointly by the Royal Society of Medicine and the Groupe de Travail sur la Filtration Erythrocytaire. The first such London Workshop was held on the occasion of the Second European Conference on Clinical Haemorheology in 1981 and its con- clusions were published in an abbreviated form. The interest in blood filtration as a technique for assessing red cell deformability has continued to increase and there are now several hundred centres around the world...

The task the editors have set themselves is to survey the field of clinical hemorheology from basic principles to up-to-date research. It is only in a new science like this that it is possible to span the whole field in a book of this size. Hemorheology, as a new approach to the study and management of a wide range of circulatory diseases, is now beginning to appear with increasing frequency in general as well as specialized medical journals. Hemorheology is also just beginning to creep into the undergraduate medical curriculum. Therefore, the majority of graduate doctors are unequipped to...