Introduction The earliest reference to altitude illness seems to be from China in about 30 BC.Tookim (a Chinese official) addressed the Generalissimo Wang Fung to the following effect…Again on passing the Great Heada...Introduction The earliest reference to altitude illness seems to be from China in about 30 BC.Tookim (a Chinese official) addressed the Generalissimo Wang Fung to the following effect…Again on passing the Great Headache Mountain, the Little Headache Mountain, the Red Land, and the Fever Slope, men′s bodies become feverish, they lose colour and are attacked with headache and vomiting; the asses and cattle being all in like condition.(Wylie, 1881; original Chinese text shown in West 1998a fig 1.3) But there seems to be no reference to altitude illness in the English literature before mountaineering became a sport in the mid nineteenth century. Although there are no mountains in the UK of physiologically significant altitude, the British were in the forefront of Alpine and Himalayan mountaineering development in the early years. So it is not surprising that British Physiologists were prominent in investigating the physiology of high altitude (HA) in the early years of the 20th century. The names of Haldane, Douglas, FitzGerald and Barcroft are well known in the history of our subject. However, the clinical effects of HA, by comparison, were neglected. Douglas and Haldane, in their long paper on the Pike′s Peak expedition of 1911 (Douglas et al.,1913), graphically describes the symptoms of acute mountain sickness (AMS) suffered by tourists who came up to 4 300m peak summit by train. They speculate, that perhaps the illness is caused by the failure of their lungs to secrete oxygen into the blood. But of course, their main interest was in the physiology of HA. Similarly, expeditions to altitude by Barcroft in 1910 and 1921 were concerned primarily with the effect of hypoxia on the physiology of various systems of the body with only incidental mention of altitude illness, for instance chronic mountain sickness seen in Peru.展开更多
文摘Introduction The earliest reference to altitude illness seems to be from China in about 30 BC.Tookim (a Chinese official) addressed the Generalissimo Wang Fung to the following effect…Again on passing the Great Headache Mountain, the Little Headache Mountain, the Red Land, and the Fever Slope, men′s bodies become feverish, they lose colour and are attacked with headache and vomiting; the asses and cattle being all in like condition.(Wylie, 1881; original Chinese text shown in West 1998a fig 1.3) But there seems to be no reference to altitude illness in the English literature before mountaineering became a sport in the mid nineteenth century. Although there are no mountains in the UK of physiologically significant altitude, the British were in the forefront of Alpine and Himalayan mountaineering development in the early years. So it is not surprising that British Physiologists were prominent in investigating the physiology of high altitude (HA) in the early years of the 20th century. The names of Haldane, Douglas, FitzGerald and Barcroft are well known in the history of our subject. However, the clinical effects of HA, by comparison, were neglected. Douglas and Haldane, in their long paper on the Pike′s Peak expedition of 1911 (Douglas et al.,1913), graphically describes the symptoms of acute mountain sickness (AMS) suffered by tourists who came up to 4 300m peak summit by train. They speculate, that perhaps the illness is caused by the failure of their lungs to secrete oxygen into the blood. But of course, their main interest was in the physiology of HA. Similarly, expeditions to altitude by Barcroft in 1910 and 1921 were concerned primarily with the effect of hypoxia on the physiology of various systems of the body with only incidental mention of altitude illness, for instance chronic mountain sickness seen in Peru.
