It is a great honor to have been chosen the President of the American Chapter of the International Cardiovascular Society. This organization, which had its birth in this country after the war, has grown steadily, and now holds an enviable position in the world.
I should like to discuss two aspects of open-heart surgery. One concerns the advantages of using hypothermia in combination with extracorporeal circulation, and the other a number of physiological studies we have been making on some of our patients. Our conviction that there are distinct advantages in using hypothermia with extracorporeal circulation is based on an experience of over 350 perfusions in which some degree of hypothermia was used, and by a comparison of the results from this group with a smaller one of over 100 patients in which extracorporeal circulation was conducted at normothermic temperatures.
If one uses hypothermia in this way, there are advantages