Pacing the Heart
Kirk Jeffrey
Carleton College
Of all the new medical devices that have come along since World War II,
the cardiac pacemaker has probably been the most successful. As of 1991, it
is the only artificial device that is fully implanted within the body to manage a
basic physiological function. About half a million Americans carry pacemakers
today, and 120,000 of the devices are implanted in new patients each year in this
country alone.
This monograph falls naturally into two parts. The early sections focus
on the invention of different versions of cardiac pacing up through the fully
implantable pacemaker. Later sections address a wider range of questions: the
rise of the medical devices industryII, further technological advances in pacing
since the implantable pacemaker, the advent of medical device regulation in the
1970's, the debates of the 1980's over the cost of medical care in the United
States, and the current status of what might broadly be called the cardiac pacing
community.
The mathematics in this volume is low level algebra and graphing,
although there isn't a lot of it. A developer could use this volume as
the basis for further mathematical topics, especially more sophisticated
modeling or statistics.
The author has also published a more complete study entitled, Machines in Our Hearts: The Cardiac
Pacemaker, the Implantable Defibrillator, and American
Health Care. This text is available from, Johns Hopkins University Press.