Electrical Properties of Mammalian Tissues

This book describes the basic electrical properties of a variety of mammalian tissues in scientific terms that even a student who has had little formal training in the physics of electricity should find understandable. Familiarity with Ohm's Law is one of the few basic tenets of physics which a reader of this book is assumed to possess. Mathematical treatment is kept to a minimum and formal thermodynamic reasoning is avoided. Instead, reliance is placed upon intuitive ideas of energy with which any undergraduate student of biology who needs to study electric events should feel comfortable. The reader is encouraged to use a simple mathematical rules to gain insight into a wide variety of biological events. Nerves, muscles and epithelial tissues are the main foci of the book. It is the author's belief that muscles, particularly cardiac muscle, provides a useful training ground for biologists who require an understanding of electrical phenomena. The heart, therefore, was chosen for the provision of many of the illustrative examples used in this book.