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This little volume of under 100 pages portrays how far, and in what direction, the quest for a neural or hormonal cause of elevated arterial pressure has got. It records the proceedings of one of those cosy little meetings in which there is a small cast of actors who freely discuss hypotheses put forward by their colleagues. The two chief characters appearing in this little sketch are long familiar to workers in the field—the carotid sinus and the renin-angiotensin mechanism. Most workers who seek a single and unique cause for arterial hypertension have confidently expected that a disturbance in either of these would prove to be responsible for elevated arterial pressure in specific types of disease.
The carotid sinus is the subject of three papers, by Eric Neil, by Hawthorne and Mandai, and by Little, Cordell, and Conrad; the last two deal with experimental hypertension. Neil states,