Respiration is a unique topic among various subdisciplines of physiology. Physiolo gists and clinicians are now able to communicate quantitative functional properties of lung mechanics and gas exchange in the language of the engineer, physicist and mathematician. This is largely due to intensive and stimulating work during the last decades of brilliant minds in a handful of excellent schools in the international family of physiologists. Among these founders of respiratory physiology are a number of clinicians, and they have. taken significant, part both in shaping the theoretical knowledge to...