Extreme Medicine: How Exploration Transformed Medicine in the Twentieth Century [Unabridged] [Audible Audio Edition]
Author: | Language: English | ISBN: B00HWFI15C | Format: PDF, EPUB
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Little more than 100 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 20th 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 extremes, 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 cutting-edge 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 o...
Direct download links available for Extreme Medicine: How Exploration Transformed Medicine in the Twentieth Century
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 7 hours and 37 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Tantor Audio
- Audible.com Release Date: February 6, 2014
- Whispersync for Voice: Ready
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00HWFI15C
Dr. Kevin Fong is a British physician who also holds degrees in astrophysics and engineering. In "Extreme Medicine," he surveys how medical practitioners expanded the frontiers of survival under extreme conditions throughout the twentieth century. Fong provides riveting anecdotes about pioneering procedures, including artificial life support, that paved the way for breakthroughs that were once considered unattainable. Dr. Fong alludes to, but does not discuss extensively, the ethical considerations of using experimental procedures on patients and sustaining human life artificially.
This well-researched and technical work of non-fiction is divided into chapters: "Ice," "Fire," "Heart," "Trauma," "Intensive Care," "Water," "Orbit," "Mars," and "Final Frontiers." If you are not an outer space enthusiast, you may less than entranced by Fong's description of the physiological changes that occur when astronauts leave Earth's atmosphere. Certainly, the chapter on Mars, while interesting, is a too long and detailed. Much more relevant to those of us who are firmly tethered to terra firma are the sections that explore polio, SARS, disfiguring burns, heart failure, and other life-threatening conditions. Through trial and error, physicians learned from their early missteps and came up with new ways of solving old problems. They gradually developed techniques to save and/or extend lives when, in the past, there would have been little or no hope.
Much of what Fong tells us is not new, since most of us are aware that initiatives involving improved sanitation, vaccinations, blood transfusions, and the use of antibiotics to combat infections have led to greater longevity.
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