Extreme Medicine: How Exploration Transformed Medicine in the 20th Century by Kevin Fong, M.D.

“As I rebuild the WLS archive with books I've read from 2011 through to 2025, I want to build a fully-fledged ecosystem of books I've read and recommend. I'd like to be able to reference and speak to any I've finished. For books I haven't reviewed (or can't entirely remember), please enjoy this brief questionnaire that can help you decide whether it's a read you'd like to pursue. Some of these are favorites I just haven't gotten around to fully reviewing yet—I'll explain in each description, but I hope this Q&A can be illuminating to you in the meantime.”

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.

Thanks for reading Words Like Silver! Subscribe for free to support my work.

Subscribe Now

placeholder

Why Did I Read This Book?

When I was in college, I majored in European History. I'd wanted to craft my own major centered around aesthetics (which makes a lot of sense in hindsight considering my interests in psychology, the arts, social histories, etc,.) but didn't have the vocabulary to recognize it then. Instead, I had my favorite professors and structures—including a man who specialized in the history of science. And this was key: each of his classes was set up like an individual study, in that you proposed a topic and a reading list and got to go ham. Heaven for me.

In one class, I talked about the limits of "pop science" books and how researchers balanced modern intrigue with accuracy. In another, I studied the way we refer to Indigenous science and insights versus so-called "Western rationality." And then there was this semester: the science of extreme athleticism.

Post-grad, the history of science specialty ended up making a lot of sense when I went on to become a travel writer; when talking to execs from PLAY Airlines at a restaurant in Reykjavík, we chatted about Guðlaugur Friðþórsson (who I also learned about in Why We Swim by Bonnie Tsui) and an annual swimming tradition that honors those lost at sea. This book, similarly, honors similar medical and anatomical insights we've only discovered through wilderness-based accidents and pushing the body to its limits in extreme scenarios.

What's This Book About?

Extreme Medicine: How Exploration Transformed Medicine in the 20th Century combines the thrill of exploration and voyage with the startling clarity of medical innovation. If you've ever gotten really into survivalism — or perhaps just Grey's Anatomy, like my own household — you may appreciate the ways in which a healthy respect for Mother Nature collides with the desperation of healing in the field. Definitely for you if you've ever stalked a NOLS medics course or similar.

What Do I Remember Most About It?

Admittedly, I don't remember a lot of the case studies now years later (and am overdue for a reread or at least a skim), but the one about using hypothermia to slow the heart and essentially buy physiological time during surgery lives rent-free in my brain. (In fact, my family watched a Grey's Anatomy episode using this research the other day.) Situations like that also illustrate the dual-edged sword of a lot of our body's innate processes: can cause death, but can be used in clever ways that push us.

Other scenarios talk about diving and being underwater, battlefield solutions, etc,. that have pushed us to develop new medications, methods, and strategies.

This book will definitely stoke an appreciation for how far we've come as innovators and risk-takers too. Human creativity will never cease to awe me, even if you tend to view fields like medicine, survivalism, etc,. as being more "left-brained."

Admittedly, I don't remember much of anything about the writing style, although I would remember if it lacked clarity or felt particularly dry. Especially in scientific works, I prefer not to notice the writing at all; seamlessness strikes me as a particular skill, and I definitely agree that the most intelligent (or perhaps just personable) researchers are those who can simplify their jargon enough to explain their ideas to us mere mortals.

If You Liked It, Read These Others:

extreme survivalism (for kids) / Everest by Gordon Korman

meditations on medicine / When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

the limits of the body / Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance by Alex Hutchinson

hypothermia & the Iceland conversation / Why We Swim by Bonnie Tsui