Basic Foundations and Primary Electrical Diseases Ihor Gussak . Charles Antzelevitch 2013 I presented the following “case report” in the preface of the fi rst edition of this book to illustrate the progress in cardiac electrophysiology over a period of 20-odd years. The evolution is still relevant: She was about 35 years old when she fi rst became my patient in 1975. She had suffered from bouts of a supraventricular tachycardia (SVT) as far back as she could remember. “In the early days,” she recalled, “when I was a kid, they would give me something in the emergency room that elevated my blood pressure and damn near tore my head off. What a headache I would get! But a lot of times it didn’t work. Then they stuck my head in a bucket of cold water and told me to ‘bear down.’ Finally, they would give me more digitalis in my vein until I started vomiting. That usually stopped the SVT.”…