Extreme Medicine Read Online Free PDF

human body. It is a story of tragic loss and outrageous survival, of questions about life and death and an attempt to understand what lies in between.
    Within a century, we have come to understand the process that killed Scott. More than that, we overcame it and learned to use it to our advantage in medicine. The intervening decades—between Scott’s heroic death and Anna BÃ¥genholm’s remarkable survival—saw progress in the field of medicine unparalleled in any other century. Flying ambulances, systems for the advanced management of traumatic injuries, the artificial cocoon of intensive care, techniques to bypass and replace the function of the human heart—all of these were necessary to allow Anna to survive an insult that Scott could not. But each of those innovations arose by accident, the products of other, unrelated challenges. There was no grand scheme through which we arrived at this point in history with such high expectations of life and its survival. In medicine and physical exploration, we moved forward into the unknown always hopeful that good fortune and survival lay in store.
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    I N THE END, S COTT’S EXPLORATION aboard the
Terra Nova
wasn’t in vain either. The expedition that he led wasn’t the first to reach the South Pole, but it was one with an important scientific legacy. It laid the foundations for the discipline of glaciology and found fossil specimens that would later point to an incredible truth: The southern continents of the world had once been linked together as a single landmass. The penguin skins collected by Scott’s companions Apsley Cherry-Garrard, Edward Wilson, and Henry Bowers on their infamous “worst journey in the world,” a trek across the Ross Ice Shelf to a penguin rookery, provided a benchmark sample that would later help scientists establish the persistence and bioconcentration of DDT insecticide after its introduction into the global food chain in the twentieth century.
    Scott’s exploits aboard the
Terra Nova
were to have been the crowning glory of a triumvirate of expeditions that included Scott’s first voyage to Antarctica aboard the
Discovery
in 1902 and Shackleton’s
Nimrod
expedition in 1907—endeavors that were instrumental in opening up the continent of Antarctica to science. Scott may have died, but what he and his expedition team started at the turn of thetwentieth century in time became a wider program of scientific research, one of fundamental importance.
    By the middle of the century, the scientific survey teams of several nations had established a plethora of permanently manned bases in Antarctica. In 1985, observations by the British Antarctic Survey detected the thinning of the Earth’s ozone layer around the South Polar region: the so-called ozone hole. Ozone in our atmosphere absorbs ultraviolet radiation, protecting us from its harmful effects. This discovery and the later realization that ozone depletion was being catalyzed by halogen atoms in chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) led to an international ban on these substances.
    By the end of the century, these multinational scientific efforts in Antarctica delivered some of the most convincing evidence that global warming is a real phenomenon. Scott’s race to the South Pole began as an exploratory effort into the unknown for which he paid with his life and the lives of his core team. However, the legacies of Scott’s exploration are discoveries that might one day save our entire planet.
    That is the truth of all exploration—in science or the physical world. We do not climb mountains, traipse to polar ice caps, split atoms, or unravel genomes simply because “they are there” but because we know that it is within the unanticipated fruits of exploration that our improved survival lies.
    Scott’s expedition marked the beginning of the end of the so-called Heroic Age of exploration. The Victorian concept of risking all for