Abstract
It is remarkable how readily we accept the proposition that blood is the essence of life, our life. Yet we miss the point. The essence of life is not blood, it is blood flow. When the heart stops beating, the body dies not because of lack of blood but because of lack of blood flow. In most cases the dead body is still awash in blood, the same amount of blood as before, but this blood is of little use because it is not flowing.
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Notes
- 1.
Plasma is sometimes listed as a fourth state. It differs from the other states only in its electrical property. This property of the plasma component of blood is important in some processes but not in the dynamics of blood flow which is the main subject of this book. More important in blood flow is the corpuscular composition of blood as will be discussed in Sect. 2.9
- 2.
Weibel ER. The Pathway For Oxygen. Harvard University Press, 1984.
- 3.
Goldstein DL. States of Matter. Dover Publications, 2014.
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Zamir, M. (2016). Introduction. In: Hemo-Dynamics. Biological and Medical Physics, Biomedical Engineering. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24103-6_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24103-6_1
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