Extracorporeal Life Support Training Manual

About the Book

Huang Di, the Yellow Emperor of China in the middle of the third millennium BCE, wrote one of the earliest and most complete texts of medicine. The Neijing or Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Medicine is an extraordinary collection of wisdom seeking to balance and improve one’s natural life force.1 The western world thanks Anaximenes of Miletus who first described air in the sixth century BCE.2 Greece continued to dominate the advancement of medicine, and in the fifth century BCE, they created a clear separation away from divine medicine, and observation theory was established. The Greeks are credited with establishing therapies to balance, remove, and replace circulating substances in the body.3 There may have been several physicians referred to as Hippocrates, but he is credited with the first reference to the four “humours:” blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile.3 Ctesibius of Alexandria provided the first scientific description of pneumatics in the third century BCE.4 Pneumatica (ðíåõìáôéêÜ) was first described as the study of devices operated by air or water pressure.4 The Buddha (c. 250 BCE) is credited with the Aryuvedic concept of disease caused by an imbalance of air, bile, and phlegm.5 The foundation of modern medicine is found in this commonality of ancient thought. This is all the more striking when we review the advanced applications of current extracorporeal technology. A more modern reference to pneumatic chemistry “is a term most-closely identified with an area of scientific research of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries. Important goals of this work were an understanding of the

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