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How Exploration Transformed Medicine in the Twentieth Century
Penguin
February 2014
On Sale: February 6, 2014
304 pages
ISBN: 1594204705
EAN: 9781594204708
Kindle: B00DMCUYWW
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
Anesthesiologist, intensive care expert, and NASA adviser
Kevin Fong explores how physical extremes push human limits
and spawn incredible medical breakthroughs Little more than one hundred years ago, maps of the world
still boasted white space: places where no human had ever
trod. Within a few short decades the most hostile of the
world’s environments had all been conquered. Likewise, in
the twentieth century, medicine transformed human life.
Doctors took what was routinely fatal and made it
survivable. As modernity brought us ever more into different
kinds of extremis, doctors pushed the bounds of medical
advances and human endurance. Extreme exploration challenged
the body in ways that only the vanguard of science could
answer. Doctors, scientists, and explorers all share a
defining trait: they push on in the face of grim odds.
Because of their extreme exploration we not only understand
our physiology better; we have also made enormous strides in
the science of healing. Drawing on his own experience as an anesthesiologist,
intensive care expert, and NASA adviser, Dr. Kevin Fong
examines how cuttingedge medicine pushes the envelope of
human survival by studying the human body’s response when
tested by physical extremes. Extreme
Medicine explores different limits of endurance and
the lens each offers on one of the systems of the body. The
challenges of Arctic exploration created opportunities for
breakthroughs in open heart surgery; battlefield doctors
pioneered techniques for skin grafts, heart surgery, and
trauma care; underwater and outer space exploration have
revolutionized our understanding of breathing, gravity, and
much more. Avant-garde medicine is fundamentally changing
our ideas about the nature of life and death. Through astonishing accounts of extraordinary events and
pioneering medicine, Fong illustrates the sheer audacity of
medical practice at extreme limits, where human life is
balanced on a knife’s edge. Extreme
Medicine is a gripping debut about the science of
healing, but also about exploration in its broadest
sense—and about how, by probing the very limits of our
biology, we may ultimately return with a better appreciation
of how our bodies work, of what life is, and what it means
to be human.
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