• CARDIAC PROCEDURES AND THERAPY

When Dennis Krikler completed his term of office as Editor of the British Heart Journal in 1992 the succeeding Editor, Professor Mike Davies, commissioned a Festscrift to acknowledge the achievements of his predecessor who had been at the helm of the journal for 11 years. The contents are a fascinating glimpse of the man, some of his cardiological achievements, certainly his wide-ranging interests and assuredly his international friendships. It is almost certainly the only time that the British Heart Journal has published an article entirely in French, a monologue by Phillipe Coumel who was one of the most original thinkers of modern arrhythmology and a scientific collaborator with Dennis.

Dennis Krikler was born in 1928 in South Africa. Most of his lifetime interests—cultural, medical, scientific, historical, and photographic—were rooted in the rich world of his childhood in the seaside resort of Muizenberg outside Cape Town where he lived for his first 28 years.

The childhood home, the house of his GP father, contained the surgery but pertinently his father had a special interest in cardiology and, unusually for a South African GP of that time, an electrocardiograph. An additional …